Growing up with Alma W. Thomas

What was it like growing up with Alma W. Thomas? During their visit to the Frist Art Museum's opening of Everything Is Beautiful, Thomas's great nephew, Charles Thomas Lewis, and dear family friend, Maria Day-Marshall, recall childhood memories and reflect on Alma's enduring legacy.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful provides a fresh perspective on the artist’s long, dynamic life (1891–1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity. This major retrospective traces her journey from semirural Georgia to Washington, DC, to becoming the first Black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York when she was eighty in 1972. On view will be an unprecedented number of Thomas’s joyful and colorful abstract paintings—the titles and forms of which express her interest in flora and fauna, music, space travel, and spirituality. In addition to her signature canvases drawn from public and private collections, there will be lesser-known and rarely seen artworks and archival material gifted by the artist’s younger sister to The Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia. They include letters, photographs, costume designs, marionettes, sculptures, and furnishings formerly in Thomas’s home. The artist’s presence will also be invoked through re-creations of her distinctive dresses with bold, geometric patterns and a new documentary about her life and career.