Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) sought out beauty every day, once stating, “Art could be anything. It could be behavior—as long as it’s beautiful.” In the mid-1960s and against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Thomas created paintings composed of dazzling interplays of pattern and vibrant color. In her work, color became symbolic and multisensory, evoking sound, motion, temperature, and even scent. During a politically charged time in American life, she maintained belief in the recuperative power of beauty and dedicated herself to its cultivation.

Composing Color draws on the extensive holdings of Thomas’s paintings at The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Organized around the artist’s favored themes of space, the Earth, and music, this exhibition invites you to see the world through Alma Thomas’s eyes.

Alma Thomas was born at the end of the 1800s—as she liked to say, in the “horse and buggy days.” She had no desire to remain there. Consciously oriented toward the future, she embraced the technological and social changes of her time. In her practice, she reflected this forward-facing attitude by painting vivid and bold abstractions, creating “a new art representing a new era.”

Thomas admired NASA’s human spaceflight program of the 1960s and ’70s. She created numerous paintings inspired by their televised events and the revelatory photographs of Earth taken from space. She imagined outer space as a place beyond human conflict, commenting, “I’d love to be on the moon to feel beauty, vastness, and purity. Nothing there that was destroyed by man, no war.”

The Eclipse
1970
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Gift of the artist, 1978.40.3

The Eclipse was the last work Thomas created as part of her Space series. It was inspired by the total solar eclipse that occurred on March 7, 1970, and was visible from across the Eastern United States, including Washington, DC. With its dark blue core and radiating rings of color, Thomas’s painting captures this rare moment of celestial alignment, its off-center composition suggesting the progressive movement of the moon across the sky.

Celestial Fantasy
1973
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Bequest of the artist, 1980.36.11

Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset
1970
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Gift of the artist, 1978.40.4

In Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset, Thomas’s reverence for beauty expands to a planetary scale. “Snoopy” was the call sign for the Apollo 10 lunar module, named after the Peanuts comic strip character who was also a NASA mascot. Astronauts flew the spacecraft around the moon to “snoop” for a promising landing site. Captivated by their accounts of seeing Earth from outer space, Thomas portrayed our planet enlivened by the reflected light of the sun.

Antares
1972
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Bequest of the artist, 1980.36.13

This densely patterned canvas conjures the intensely hot surface of the red supergiant Antares. One of the brightest and largest stars visible to the naked eye, Antares stands out for its distinctive reddish hue, matched only by the planet Mars. In fact, the star’s name means “rival of Ares”–the ancient Greek god of war who was known to the Romans as Mars.

Gray Night
1972
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Museum purchase, 1972.147

Grey Night Phenomenon
1972
Acrylic paint on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum: Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1975.92.1