A Smithsonian magazine special report
The D.C. Street Where Pioneering Abstract Artist Alma Thomas Lived for 70 Years Has Been Renamed in Her Honor
Thomas worked as an art teacher at the city’s public schools for 35 years before dedicating herself to painting full-time when she was in her 60s
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Two months before she died, Alma Thomas invited the art critic Eleanor Munro to her red brick house in Washington, D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood.
It was late 1977, and Munro was conducting research for her book Originals: American Women Artists, a collection of interviews with the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois. Although Thomas had found fame comparatively late in life, following her retirement from art teaching in 1960, her abstract art was truly original. In beads, strings and blotches of color, her paintings seemed to capture the refracted rainbows contained in every ray of light.
The small house was “crammed with paintings and an orderly richness of books, papers [and] artists’ announcements,” as Munro wrote in her book, per an excerpt published in the Washington Post in 1979. Thomas pointed out a holly tree pressed against the front windows.
About a decade earlier, Thomas had noticed the light filtering through the leaves and glass. “I looked at the tree in the window, and that became my inspiration,” she recalled. “There are six patterns in there right now that I can see. And every morning since then, the wind has given me new colors through the window panes.”
Decades after that tree inspired Thomas’ late-career success—which included a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at age 77 and a painting in the White House’s collections—the artist’s former home still stands.
At a ceremony on May 21, members of the D.C. Council, as well as friends and family of Thomas, gathered on the street where Thomas worked and lived for nearly 70 years to officially designate it “Alma Thomas Way.”
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“When we do these street renaming projects, it’s in honor of individuals, but it’s also in an effort to try to elevate and introduce local heroes to folks for the next generation,” councilmember Christina Henderson, who co-introduced the bill to name the street in Thomas’ honor, tells Culture Type’s Victoria L. Valentine.
Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891. Her family moved to D.C. in 1906 and soon purchased the red brick home on 15th Street.
In 1924, Thomas became the first graduate of Howard University’s fine arts program and embarked on a 35-year career as an art teacher at Shaw Junior High School in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood.
During those years, she managed to earn a master’s degree in arts education from Columbia University, study art at American University and become the founding vice president of the Barnett-Aden Gallery, one of the first Black-owned art galleries in the United States, established in 1943.
But it was only after her retirement in 1960 that Thomas could dedicate herself to painting full time.
“It’s remarkable, you know, the late-career explosion of creativity, where her whole artistic process transformed,” Melissa Ho, the curator of 20th-century art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, told Smithsonian magazine’s Shantay Robinson in 2023.
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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas became renowned for her abstract art that focused on the glittering side of life.
For Thomas, beauty was restorative. It healed. It transcended politics and history. “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man,” Thomas said in 1970.
Snoopy – Early Sun Display on Earth from that same year exemplifies her iconic “Alma’s Stripes,” colorful vertical patterns that form a sun of many colors. Later works, such as 1976’s Hydrangeas Spring Song, suggest new directions her artistic development may have taken.
Thomas died two years later at age 86. “The uncompleted arc of her talent makes her a perennial artist’s artist, consulted by young abstract painters even now,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl for the New Yorker in 2016.
With a street named in her honor and her house of nearly 70 years on the National Register of Historic Places, her contributions to her community have endured, too.
“I love Alma Thomas. I love her work. I love who she was as a person. She was a real model of what you would want to be,” Susan Talley, founder of the Friends of Alma Thomas group, said at the dedication ceremony last month, per Culture Type. “I would never have thought we could have had a street named for her. So thank you for coming and sharing in my enthusiasm.”
