After decades as a representational painter, in her seventies Alma Thomas turned to abstraction, creating shimmering, mosaic-like fields of color with rhythmic dabs of paint that were often inspired by forms from nature. The artist had been fascinated with space exploration since the late 1960s, and her later paintings often referenced America’s manned Apollo missions to the moon. Although she had never flown, Thomas began to paint as if she were in an airplane, capturing what she described as shifting patterns of light and streaks of color. “You look down on things,” she explained. “You streak through the clouds so fast… . You see only streaks of color.”
Starry Night and the Astronauts evokes the open expanse and celestial patterns of a night sky, but despite its narrative title, the work could also be read as an aerial view of a watery surface, playing with our sense of immersion within an otherwise flat picture plane. The viewer is immersed not only in the sense of organic expanse that this painting achieves, however, but also in an encounter with Thomas’s process: the surface here is clearly constructed stroke by stroke. Meanwhile, the glimpses of raw canvas between each primary-colored mark seem as vivid as the applied paint itself—almost as if the composition were backlit. Thomas relied on the enlivening properties of color throughout her late-blooming career. “Color is life,” she once proclaimed, “and light is the mother of color.” This painting was created in 1972, when the artist was eighty. In the same year, she became the first African American woman to receive a solo exhibition at a major art museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Purchased with funds provided by Mary P. Hines in memory of her mother, Frances W. Pick
Reference Number
1994.36
Extended information about this artwork
Alma Thomas, alma w. thomas, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972), n.p., cat. 19.
Gene Baro, David C. Driskell, and Jacob Kainen, Alma W. Thomas, exh. cat. (Washington D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1972), n.p., cat. 35.
Jan Keene Muhlert, Color and Image: Six Artists from Washington, exh. cat. (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1975), n.p., cat. 80.
Anderson Gallery, Selected Works from the Gallery Collection, exh. checklist (Buffalo: Anderson Gallery), n.p., cat. 23.
Andrea D. Barnwell, “Portfolio,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (1999), 213, no. 24.
Andrea D. Barnwell and Kirsten P. Buick, “A Portfolio of Works by African American Artists Continuing the Dialogue: A Work in Progress,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, 2 (1999), 187.
Ian Berry and Lauren Haynes, Alma Thomas, exh. cat. (Studio Museum in Harlem/Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College/DelMonico Books, 2015), 107, 142, 143 (color ill.), 150, 151 (color ill.), 234 (ill.), 246, 250.
Richard Kalina, “Through Color,” Art in America, 104, 5 (May 2016), 124 (color ill.), 125.
Ken Johnson, “‘Alma Thomas,’ and Incandescent Painter” The New York Times (online), Aug. 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/arts/design/alma-thomas-an-incandescent-pioneer.html
Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz, eds. Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, exh. cat. (Columbus, GA: The Columbus Museum, 2021), 295, cat. 143 (color ill.).
Neil Steinberg, “Art can take you to a particular place,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 20, 2023, 2 (color ill.).
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas Retrospective, Apr. 25–May 28, 1972, cat. 19.
Washington D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Alma W. Thomas Retrospective Exhibition, Sept. 8–Oct. 15, 1972, cat. 35.
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Alma Thomas, Oct. 10–Nov. 3, 1973, not in cat.
New York, Women’s International Art Center, Ten Black Women, May 1–23, 1975, no cat.
Iowa City, University of Iowa, Color and Image: Six Artists from Washington, Sept. 5–Nov. 18, 1975, cat. 80.
Buffalo, Anderson Gallery, Selected Works from the Gallery Collection, Oct. 5–Nov. 16, 1991, cat. 23, exhibition checklist.
Saratoga, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Alma Thomas, Feb. 6–June 5, no cat. no.; New York, Studio Museum in Harlem, July 14–Oct. 30, 2016.
Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Museum of Art, Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful, July 9, 2021-Oct. 3, 2021, cat. 143; Washington D.C., The Phillips Collection, Oct. 30, 2021-Jan. 23, 2022; Nashville, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Feb. 25, 2022-June 5, 2022; Columbus, GA, Columbus Museum July 1, 2022- Sept. 25, 2022.
The artist; sold to Martha Jackson Gallery [later Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, NY], New York, Oct. 9, 1973 [invoice; copy in curatorial object file]; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, Mar. 14, 1994.
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