The Denver Art Museum recently collaborated with several Black women creatives and business owners on a video project to help introduce Denver to an iconic Black woman artist. Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a traveling exhibition from Washington, D.C., that explores the life of the groundbreaking artist and educator. “Alma Thomas was a fearless American artist who boldly broke out of every confine her environment ever tried to impose on her, overcoming barriers and forging new paths for Black women artists,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the DAM. “Following up on impactful shows by Jordan Casteel, Shantell Martin and Senga Nengudi, this exhibition is the next of many presentations
D.C., with her family when she was a teenager. She became Howard University’s first student to earn a degree in fine art in 1924 and went on to teach art in D.C. public schools for more than 30 years, as well as serving as vice president of the Barnett Aden Gallery, one of the nation’s first racially integrated and Black-owned art galleries. At the age of 80, in 1972, Thomas presented solo exhibitions at both the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, earning her unprecedented recognition for a Black woman artist. For the video, the museum was inspired by three themes in the exhibition—music and nature, space and sky and earth and seasons—to invite renowned choreographer and dancer Cleo Parker Robinson, Denver-born artist Jordan Casteel and Dr. Breigh Jones-Coplin, owner of Black + Blossomed floral shop, to tour the exhibition with Rory Padeken, the DAM’s Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and local curator for Composing Color. The DAM
highlighting the creativity and artistic contributions of Black women artists.”
Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in 1891 in Columbus, Georgia, and moved to Washington,
Graphic of Alma Thomas painting in her kitchen studio. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
16 The Acumen
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