A sweeping retrospective of Alma W. Thomas's wide-reaching artistic practice that sheds new light on her singular search for beauty Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas's life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the years of commercial and critical success, and describes how her innovative palette and loose application of paint grew out of a long study of color theory. Essays trace Thomas's journey from semirural Georgia to international recognition and situate her work within the context of the Washington Color School and creative communities connected to Howard University. Featuring rarely seen theatrical designs, sculpture, family photographs, watercolors, and marionettes, this volume demonstrates how Thomas's pursuit of beauty extended to every facet of her life-from her exuberant abstractions to the conscientious construction of her own persona through community service, teaching, and gardening. Published in association with The Columbus Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (July 9-October 3, 2021) The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (October 30, 2021-January 23, 2022) Frist Art Museum, Nashville (February 25-June 5, 2022) The Columbus Museum, GA (July 1-September 25, 2022)

A rich reconsideration of a short-lived but visionary voice in twentieth-century American painting and his enduring relevance Bob Thompson (1937-1966) came to critical acclaim in the late 1950s for paintings of unparalleled figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist's prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson's outlier status and pays close attention to his sustained engagements with themes of community, visibility, and justice. As the contributors contextualize the artist's ambitions and his unique creative process, they reposition Thompson as a predecessor to contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. Featuring an array of artwork, and never-before-published poems and archival materials, this study situates Thompson's extraordinary output within ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation. Published in association with Colby College Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (July 20, 2021-January 9, 2022) Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago (February 10-May 15, 2022) High Museum of Art, Atlanta (June 18-September 11, 2022) Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (October 9, 2022-January 8, 2023)

Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices. Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures--and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has ramifications for the present.