Alma Thomas - via AP

Her artwork ("Heaven Light") graces the Obama's individual residence in the White Business firm. She was the starting time educatee to graduate with a B.S. in Fine Arts from Howard University. She was the first African American to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, and critics raved! A teacher and customs arts programmer, this lady impacted lives in a positive way. She shows us that the artistic journey is limitless.

Alma Woodsey Thomas is a truly distinctive creative person featured in Abrakadoodle'due south creative fine art programme for children. Born September 22, 1891, Alma showed her interest in the arts at a young age, making puppets and sculpture creations. She was a lifelong learner and educator and what yous might call a late bloomer, evolving into an Expressionist painter.

Alma's family moved her from Georgia to Washington, D.C. in 1906 due to the racial turmoil in Georgia, also as the well-respected (though and then segregated) public school organisation available in the nation's capitol. Alma graduated from high school and and then studied kindergarten education and became a teacher. Some years passed and in 1921, she entered Howard University and became the first graduate with a B.S. in Fine Arts in 1924. Alma went on to teach at the inferior high level and started a community arts program that encouraged student appreciation of fine art. In 1934, Alma earned her Masters in Art Education from Columbia University, and she also studied painting for nigh a decade at American University. She traveled to fine art centers in Western Europe and after retiring in 1960, she dedicated herself to painting in the kitchen of her childhood home in D.C. She was 69 years immature! Alma's passion for education and her happy, colorful artwork inspire the states all, and Abrakadoodle salutes her contribution to inventiveness and the arts!

According to a 2009 article, White House Art: Colors from a World of Black and White, from the New York Times, "Her art was accessible. Her abstraction was never actually abstruse; y'all could always see the nature in it: flowers, air current. Her paintings were modernistic just part of some older tradition too, every bit shut to quilts as to Matisse. In a racially charged era, her art wasn't political, or at to the lowest degree non overtly and then. Instead of talking anger, she talked color: 'Through color I take sought to concentrate on dazzler and happiness, rather than on man's inhumanity to man.'

Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solor exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and that aforementioned year, her work was also shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

"Creativity art is for all fourth dimension 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 globe, independent of age, race and nationality; the statement may stand up unchallenged." ~ Alma Thomas, 1970