Colorfield Weaving Project inspired by Alma Thomas
Man’s highest aspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.
- Alma Thomas
We do not own the rights to these images. Apollo 12 Splash Down, 1970; Starry Night and the Astronauts, 1972; Mars Dust, 1972
grab the complete ALMA THOMAS COLORFIELD WEAVING project PDF + Printable pack here:
Inspired by the moon landing in 1969, Alma Thomas began her second major theme of paintings. The series Space, Snoopy and Earth.
We do not own the rights to this image: Portrait of Alma Thomas by Michael Fischer, 1976. Via Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891. She was the oldest of four girls, her mother was a dressmaker and her father was a business man. Her family relocated to Washington DC in 1907 to escape the racial violence of the South. As a child she dreamed of being an architect or an engineer but the harsh reality of social and racial barriers caused her to change her aspirations, and set out on a path to become an artist. Alma would become the first Fine Arts Graduate from Howard University. After graduating, she landed a job as an art teacher at a nearby Junior High School. Teaching allowed Alma to make a living while she pursued life as an artist in her spare time. Alma developed a signature painting style; thumb-sized rectangle brush strokes painted on top of large blocks of color. She painted with acrylic because she was able to achieve soft fluidity, similar to what she also loved about watercolor.
After 35 years of teaching, Alma retired to pursue art as a full-time career. She got her first taste of success in the art world at age 75, showing her work in a 1966 exhibition at Howard University. Six years later, she became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum at the age of 81.
In her lifetime, she watched the Wright brothers fly, lived through both world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and witnessed man land on the moon. Space exploration was a major inspiration for Alma..
I was born at the end of the 19th century, horse-and-buggy days, and experienced the phenomenal changes of the 20th century machine and space age, today not only can our great scientists send astronauts to and from the moon to photograph it's surface and bring back samples of rocks and other materials, but through the medium of color television all can actually see and experience the thrill of these adventures. These phenomena set my creativity in motion.