Alma Thomas’s Late Blooms

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 25th July 2016

Belated recognition of an artist is hardly a new story. You might say that for Alma Thomas this was not personal but simply standard treatment given her race (African American) and gender. Once free of her day job as a teacher – and as the twentieth century shifted towards greater inclusiveness – she made her mark. One critic describes her work as “gorgeous … like a Monet landscape translated into a grid by Mondrian”.