Alma Thomas’s Starry Night and the Astronauts | Art Institute Essentials Tour

[Hendrik Folkerts] When I stand in front of this work, I'm really sort of taken by the very specific approach to abstraction, how she builds an image to almost like a mosaic of form and also its verticality. My name is Hendrik Folkerts, a curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Alma Thomas was born in 1891.

She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, until 1907, when the family moved to Washington, DC. And in 1921, she entered the newly formed Fine Arts Department at Howard University, where she trained in a more academic style of realism and figuration. In 1925 she began teaching art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, DC, where she taught for 35 years, until her retirement in 1960.

It was really that kind of after her retirement she became a full-time artist. And it is that work that she is now most well-known for. The key point in her career as an artist came in the mid-1960s.

So in 1964, art historian James Porter invited her to show her work in a major retrospective at Howard University. The artist said that she wanted to paint something radically different from anything she had done, like, before that time or ever seen, as she has said herself. And this exhibition really became the platform for her, not only to show a lot of new work, but to also make it the stage for her radical new approach to abstraction.

"Starry Night and the Astronauts" is the last work in Alma Thomas's "Space" series, a body of abstract works that the artist started in 1969 in response to the Apollo missions, explorations of space and the moon landings. And we have to realize, like, the artist not only lived through the Wright brothers's first airplane flight but also the Apollo space program and the first landing on the moon in 1969. This changed her perspective, like it did everyone's at the time.

[Alma Thomas] I was born at the end of the 19th century, horse and buggy days, and experienced the phenomenal changes of the 20th-century machine and space age. Today, not only can our great scientists send astronauts to and from the moon to photograph its surface, but through the medium of color television, all can actually see and experience the thrill of these adventures.

[Hendrick] Her style and sort of approach to form, color, and abstraction is absolutely unique. I only know really of a few artists who have a mark named after them. In this case, called the "Alma Stripe." They are simultaneously uniform and they have a kind of irregularity as well.

So they make an image as a whole. But if you sort of study the stripes in particular, you also know that they have a life of their own. It's important to note that "Starry Night and the Astronauts" was exhibited that same year of its making, in 1972, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

And that year really marked the first solo exhibition of an African American female artist at that museum. So you're looking at a work who was not only part of a sort of very important moment in the artist's career, but that was also, physically part of this moment in history. You know, this is, this is no small thing.