Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Primary: After and with Alma Thomas

Primary: After and with Alma Thomas

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline

Hardcover

ArtistsAmerican Art - African American & BlackBlack American Studies

Publisher Price: $30.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date September 29, 2026

ISBN10: 0300279302
ISBN13: 9780300279306
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Sep 29 2026
Pages: 176
Language: English
An exploration of sisterhood, creativity, and community inspired by the artist Alma Thomas's life and work, from the award-winning poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Alma Thomas (1891-1978) was an influential figure in twentieth-century modern art, best known for her bright, mosaiclike abstract paintings. Although some critics have seen Thomas's emphasis on beauty, color, and abstract art as a way to divorce her work from her life as a Black woman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reveals how Thomas's art was, in fact, deeply rooted in the Black community in which she lived. Black, in other words, was one of Thomas's primary colors.

Gumbs sheds light on Thomas's experience as a junior high school teacher in the still-segregated schools of Washington, D.C., where Thomas--as educator, mentor, and advocate--established community art programs for Black schoolchildren and galleries to showcase Black artists' work. In this volume of poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, allowing the wonder in Thomas's work to open her to wonder about her own creativity, sistering, daughtering, and practice of communal transformation.

Also from

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline

View All

Also in

Artists

View All