Questions hovered in the art world air recently after the White House released the list of paintings that the Obamas have borrowed from various Washington museums for their presidential home.

How, people mused, did the choices rate, coolness- wise? Fair. Jasper Johns and Ed Ruscha have a certain senior chic. Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn are a bit blue-chip bland. Still, if there was nothing rad on the list, at least there was nothing bad.

Why were there so few women? Why no Hispanics or Asian- Americans? And why, a few art-worldlings fretted, did the Obamas stay with the stodgy old medium of painting?

I had one pressing question. If the offer were made, which artist from the White House list would I choose for my New York City apartment? I knew the answer: Alma W. Thomas.

Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, and moved to Washington in her teens. She lived there until her death in 1978. Her parents had relocated for two reasons: racial violence was on the rise in Georgia, and Washington had excellent public schools. Thomas got a solid, though segregated, education, and taught art in one of the city’s junior high schools for 35 years.

Before taking that job, she did other things. In 1921, she enrolled in a home economics program at Howard University, with an interest in making theater costumes. An instructor suggested she study art instead. She became Howard’s first fine art major, with a specialty in painting.

The painting continued sporadically during her teaching years. Only when she retired could she finally start to paint full time. She was 69.

You can see her making the leap into abstraction in the earlier of her two paintings on the White House list, “Watusi(Hard Edge),” from 1963. It’s a steal of a Matisse collage. Thomas just shifts the pieces around and cools the colors down. But through copying Matisse, she began to work out a format she would use repeatedly.

This consisted of short, blocklike strokes of color lined up in columns and bands set against a different color or unpainted ground. The second Thomas painting on the list, “Sky Light” (1973), is a classic example of the type: a wall of close-together vertical columns made of linked blue strokes, with a white ground showing through.

In 1972, at 80, she was the first African-American woman to have a solo at the Whitney Museum. Critics raved. There was a second retrospective in 1977, and Jimmy Carter invited her to the White House.

Her art was accessible. Her abstraction was never really abstract: you could always see the nature in it: flowers, wind. In a racially charged era, her art wasn’t political, or at least not overtly so. When asked if she thought of herself as a black artist, she said: “No, I do not. I’m a painter. I’m an American.”

Instead of talking anger, she talked color: “Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”

But when Thomas said color what was she really saying? She vividly remembered being barred from museums as a child because of her race. A lifetime later, she acknowledged that things were still hard. “It will take a long time for us to get equality,” she said in an interview. “But what do you expect when whites closed up all the schools and libraries on us for so long? They know that schooling would give us our salvation.”

In many ways she’s an ideal artist, and power of example, for the Obama White House: forward-looking without being radical; post-racial but also raceconscious; in love with new, in touch with old.


LEDGER-ENQUIRER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS / Alma W. Thomas began painting full time after retiring as a teacher.