Visitors in Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. Artworks © Smithsonian American Art Museum.
hired Human-Focused Media, a Black-owned local video production company we’ve worked with on multiple occasions, to create the video. Padeken discusses the 19 paintings in the show, which the iconic artist created in her most fruitful and generative period between the 1960s and late 1970s, creating a style of her own with dazzling interplays of patterns and colors. “Thomas’s exuberant art shows her love of how living things grow, change and renew themselves,” Padeken said. “Her art practice blossomed in the 1960s and her vibrant artworks transcended established genres, reflecting the everchanging colors and sounds of her surroundings. Her artistic evolution reflected her belief in the need for new art expressions to represent a new era of world history.” In the section of the exhibition inspired in part by Thomas’s love of music, Cleo Parker Robinson related to the sense of movement in the work. Speaking about a painting called Wind and Crepe Myrtle Concerto, 1973, Robinson said, “There’s this kind of background and then there’s
this coming forward. So you almost have this chorus, and then you have that soloist coming out and it’s wonderful. I feel like the leaves are really speaking. They’re moving. The pink is almost like the sky to me, how the sky can turn all those different colors. So hearing where she has taken her inspiration from, it just expands the imagination.” Padeken also explained that “Alma saw her art as forward looking. She aligned it with the scientific advancements of her day. She wanted to create a new art for a new future. Space was a place of liberation, right?,” he said. “It was a space of freedom. So through painting that she could imagine another kind of world that was quite different than what was happening in our country.” Jordan Casteel marveled at the trailblazing artist. “She is really charting a path at a very difficult time for Black artists, for people like me and artists like me to kind of exist now,” she said. “That there’s a real honoring that I have for her and her ability to see my future as being so
17 The Acumen
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