Untitled (Still Life) — Alma Thomas
[Pine] Trees [from Maine series] — David Driskell
Today I saw with a friend, a dual exhibit at the Phillips Collection of the marvelously luminous and comforting paintings, puppets, costume, and prints of Alma Thomas and the visionary, sorrowful, African American paintings, prints and stained glass window work of David Driskell
Alma W. Thomas, 1963
David Driskell, recently
I’ve been to the Phillips many times before, the last time to see the exhibit made from Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. This earlier one was on the theme of global displacement. Here we concentrated on the work of two individual geniuses, African-American both, lifelong teachers of art both, with Driskell, a student of Thomas’s. I didn’t buy the heavy expensive catalogue books, so cannot share images except those I’ve found here on the Net. No matter. If you live close by, you can go, and the two exhibits have been traveling about the US for some time now.
It includes two excellent movies, the one about Alma Thomas focusing more on her life and how her work emerged form that; the one about David Driskell focusing on details of his art, how he did the prints, his religion. She found great solace and fulfillment in her 35 years in one classroom; he spoke of the ugly things he saw in social worlds in his experience and sought to escape. One of the most frightening moments in the two exhibits was a clip from his film showing a gang of Ku Klux Klan people in white sheets in the dark of night setting on fire icons on the grounds of the traditionally Negro college Driskell attended. One of the most poignant moments of of hers was her gladness at never having married, at having been a Miss Thomas all her life, and the independence that meant; at one point late in life she had a bad case of arthritis and was bedridden for two years; when she started painting again, she used pillows and whatever came to hand to paint huge canvases (some seen at the exhibit).
I’ve linked in the two excellent wikipedia and Phillips’ articles about their lives and work. I will find articles and more modest books, obtain them and add to this blog.
***************************************
Two of the galleries with Alma Thomas’s art
For now what I’d like to emphasize about Alma Thomas, is she lived a long life as an African-American, with all its hardships and painful experiences, but also embedded in communities of Black people in DC and of artists (once she grew older and had gone to Howard University), these gradually including the finest artists of the century. So when she says “everything is beautiful,” and declares so roundly on the joys of creativity and how much she rejoiced in teaching and her experiences of life, she is speaking from the heart. Her art developed from a quiet realism, some of it a kind of naive school,
Alma Thomas’s Mandolin
to her own brand of abstract expressionism — thousands of squares of color making figures and designs her titles give concrete allusive meaning to. This is from her Journey to Abstraction:
This is just a gorgeous pink when literally seen on the wall:
From her Flower Garden:
The many circles are a transposition of deeply rooted memories of a garden she saw as a child; she loves controlled precise forms too
I like realism more and wish I could share with you her pictures of her grandfather’s house, of a neighborhood of quiet private houses seen from the POV of their back yards (you see above her mandolin). Each of her drawings has a consistency with the others in mood and tone. Her mother was a dressmaker, she participated in putting on plays, making costumes herself, drawing some figures that looked like dreams of historical romance, and made a puppet set once:
Clown and woman marionettes, Fabric, wood, paint, and strings
The touching qualities of these, with their hints of African-American life in enslavement must be seen live.
**********************************************
Here is David Driskell, surrounded by his paintings in his studio
Driskell’s art is a lot more aggressive, and troubling, much more African motifs, strong contrasting colors:
He presents his own image here and there, very somber:
He seems to love trees:
Winter Trees, this is called
Here is Driskell’s obituary with hard pictures of African-American men, far angrier than anything seen in the Phillips. In the Phillips’ exhibit there were a number of modern versions of writhing Christs and the film showed stained glass windows with modern Church imagery in African-American churches
Here he is surrounded by his work once again, this time in a Maine Contemporary Center for Art
********************************************
What to say? how to conclude, now that I know the history of lynching and repeated massacres and arson burn-outs of African American people and communities — Thomas’s grandfather was born enslaved, and as a girl she lived in Georgia where she could not progress in school past the 9th grade. That was one reason her parents moved with her and her sisters to DC. Here is what she wrote in 1970:
“Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time. It is of all ages, of every land, and if by this we mean the creative spirit in man which produces a picture or a statue is common to the whole civilized world, independent of age, race and nationality; the statement may stand unchallenged.”
-Alma Thomas
Here is his hopeful strong statement:
“I was not looking for a unified theme,” he told The Times in 1977. “And this, of course, usually upsets the critics because they want to see a continuous kind of thing. I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years, and by stable participants I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone.”
Both went to Howard University; for both education, what happened to them in schools and then churches (though she was not herself personally religious at all) were central to achieving, and pride of recognition and belonging to a world of superior spirits. And all that the Civil Rights Era has won for all of us which groups of deeply harm-driven people are trying to undermine.
Thomas’s depiction of the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King uttered his famous “I have dream” speech
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 