Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2018-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

ALMA WOODSEY THOMAS (1891–1978)

Still Life with Mandolin, circa 1955

Oil on masonite, 19⅞ × 35¼ inches

In 1907 the violence against and degradation of black lives in the American South caused John Harris Thomas and Amelia Cantey Thomas to abandon their individual successes in Columbus, Georgia, in order to pursue better educational prospects for their four daughters in Washington, DC. The couple’s eldest child, Alma, took full advantage of the educational options set before her. She attended the city’s well-regarded historically black college, Howard University, becoming the first graduate of its art program in 1924, and later earned her teaching certification. Throughout her nearly forty-year career as a teacher in the public school system, Thomas remained committed to her artistic ambitions, painting during off-hours. After her retirement in 1960, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to her craft. Although she was often dismissive of her early output, these works document her skillful, sustained negotiation within canonical historical practices, as demonstrated by Still Life with Mandolin.

The spatial experimentation seen in Still Life with Mandolin preceded the artist’s progression toward her signature mature style: full abstractions of the natural world around her. The painting investigates space yet remains firmly rooted in a timeless academic tradition, and reflects Thomas’s efforts to master the concepts of depth, color, light, and shadow. As for her avant-garde predecessors Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, still life provided ideal subject matter for the investigation of form. Both men executed versions of still lifes featuring mandolins in the 1920s at the height of their explorations of Synthetic Cubism. Dating to the 1950s, Thomas’s vignette has a Cézannesque quality as it displays the mandolin and the bowl of fruit from different perspectives. The viewer glimpses both the inside of the bowl and the front of the stringed instrument. The red, green, and orange surface on which the arrangement sits provides a similar sense of spatial ambiguity, as the viewer can faintly identify the separation between the horizontal plane and vertical backdrop.

Thomas’s participation in Loïs Mailou Jones’s Little Paris Group, her association with the Washington Color School painters, and the classes she took with Jacob Kainen and fellow Southerner Ben Summerford at American University in the 1950s galvanized her to create something altogether new for a retrospective exhibition held at Howard University in 1966. She set out to “paint something different from anything I’d ever done. Different from anything I’d ever seen. I thought to myself, that must be accomplished.”1 This trademark adventurous spirit and optimism informed Thomas’s paintings from that point forward, as exemplified in her 1971 Blue Ground Stripe. Her previous inquiries into color and space carry over to her mature productions, as does her determination to formulate her own techniques and rules.

Thomas’s biography is a quintessential American narrative of hope and opportunity. But her story’s details also attest to the difficult reality of racial and gender politics in her lifetime. Despite those hardships, Thomas insisted that she “never bothered painting the ugly things in life. People struggling, having difficulty. You meet that when you go out, and then you have to come back and see the same thing hanging on the wall.

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