Alma Thomas, a graduate of Howard University, taught art in the Washington, D.C., public school system. After her retirement, in 1960, she pursued a career as an artist. In the late 1950s, she enrolled in painting classes at American University and subsequently developed professional relationships with members of the Washington Color School, such as Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, whose luminous, color-field paintings strongly influenced her. By 1964 she had abandoned realism and, painting with acrylics, developed her own, signature style, methodically layering small bars of bright colors that she applied thickly onto light, spacious backgrounds. Thomas’s work has been featured in numerous one-woman exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

Starry Night with Astronauts is the final work in Space Series, a group of abstractions that Thomas initiated in 1969 in response to the Apollo missions’ exploration of space and landings on the moon. The canvas’s title, palette, and facture reference Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889; New York, The Museum of Modern Art). As with other paintings in the series, the Art Institute’s composition exhibits no obvious pictorial references to or symbols of the expeditions. Rather, the artist depended solely on color, form, and application to suggest her theme. To evoke the night sky, she filled the large canvas with vertical strokes of blue––ranging from sky blue to indigo––and, in the upper right-hand corner, added a small kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, and yellows to suggest a star. The colorful bars seem translucent, recalling tesserae, the small shards of glass or glazed terracotta arrayed in mosaics. From various angles, the light background and traces of white paint strategically placed over the blues create the sensation of flickering light. Thus, the entire surface appears to glisten, suggesting the mysterious beauty of outer space, and inspiring a sense of wonder reminiscent of what many felt in the 1960s and 1970s upon witnessing the courage and effort that permitted humankind to explore the unknown. (ADB)