The street where the renowned abstract painter Alma Thomas (1891-1978) lived for most of her life now bears her name. The block of 15th Street NW in Washington, DC where Thomas grew up—in the house at number 1530—is now “Alma Thomas Way” following a ceremony helmed by District Councilmembers Christina Henderson and Brooke Pinto, who introduced the bill advocating for the new street title.
“When we do these street renaming projects, it’s in honour of individuals, but it’s also in an effort to try to elevate and introduce local heroes to folks for the next generation,” councilmember Henderson told Culture Type. Pinto added: “This is especially important to me because I live just a block away. It’s really going to be a treat to be able to see [the new street signs] and honour Alma Thomas every day as I walk by in this community”.
The Alma Thomas Way street signs are installed on the corners of 15th and Church streets and 15th and Q streets, bookending the block where she lived.
Thomas, the first Black woman to have her work enter the White House’s permanent collection, lived and worked at this address for almost 70 years. The house, a cheerful brick structure listed on the National Register of Historic Places and a site on DC’s African American Heritage Trail, was purchased by her parents in 1907. As an artist and educator, Thomas was singular both in her talent and in her trailblazing spirit. In 1924, she became the first student to earn a fine arts degree at Howard University, and later served as a founding vice president of one of the first Black-owned art galleries in the US, Barnett-Aden Gallery.
A longtime high school art teacher, Thomas found international success after her retirement. Her involvement in the DC Black avant-garde art scene known as the the Little Paris Group inspired her to pursue night classes at American University at age 59, exposing her to a new vocabulary of painterly expression. Soon considered a stand-out of the Washington Color School, Thomas’s exuberant compositions caught the eyes of curators at the Whitney Museum, which—when the artist was in her early eighties—gave her a solo show, the first in the institution’s history devoted to a Black woman.
Henderson, in her comments to Culture Type, added: “[Alma Thomas] is, I think, the quintessential example of never giving up on your dreams and it’s never too late for success.”
Thomas’s role as a local luminary has been recognised in numerous ways by her community both during her life and since her death. After her solo show at the Whitney Museum and a subsequent showcase at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1972, then-DC mayor Walter Washington declared 9 September “Alma W. Thomas Day”. In 2021, the current Mayor Muriel Bowser proclaimed 12 September a city-wide “Day of Remembrance for Alma W. Thomas” to mark the artist’s 130th birthday. In 2023-24, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organised the exhibition Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas (which will open next month at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields for the third stop on a nationwide tour). And last year, Thomas’s work was the subject of an exhibition at the DC Public Library, Let This World Be Beautiful: Celebrating the Life and Art of Alma Thomas, featuring nine watercolor studies donated by Susan Talley, founder of the Friends of Alma Thomas group.
“I love Alma Thomas,” Talley told Culture Type. “I would never have thought we could have had a street named for her.”
