Composing Color Paintings by Alma Thomas at the SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

James Kalm parks his bike and motors to the nation’s capital to bring viewers a strolling tour of “Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas at the Smithsonian American Art Museum”. Alma Thomas taught art classes to junior high students in Washington D.C. for thirty-five years. It wasn’t until after her retirement that she turned her attentions to becoming a full-time artist. In the remaining twenty years of her life, she developed a unique abstract language of painting that became critically recognized and established her as a fundamental practitioner of Color Field painting. During the artist’s lifetime the Smithsonian acquired over a dozen of the painter’s major works, and after her passing she bequeathed another sizable number of works to the Museum, making the Smithsonian’s holdings the largest collection of Alma Thomas’s works in the world. This program was recorded November 13, 2023 #jameskalmreport #jameskalmroughcut #lorenmunk