New Book Explores Alma Thomas's“Cornrows” Paintings

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A new chapter titled“Field,” excerpted from Alexis Pauline Gumbs's book Primary: After and With Alma Thomas, delves into the experimental approach of artist Alma Thomas through the lens of Black diaspora visual art theory and personal reflection.

Published by Yale University Press on September 29, the book explores how Thomas's artistic choices connect to broader cultural and historical contexts.

The chapter references a 1975 review of Thomas's exhibition at Howard University by Richard Powell, described as“a young clear-eyed critic striving for objectivity” at the time. Powell praised Thomas for her decision to“forgo the unreal objectiveness of details and detached photographic realism and dive into what we see and feel.” He also noted her departure from the“mundanity” of impressionism, suggesting instead that she“cornrows and parboils it,” and“aerates the ground as only a native Georgian can and places growing colors in it the way one plants vegetables and fruit in a backyard.”

This interpretation, the excerpt notes, anticipates how art historian Kellie Jones later contextualized Thomas's experimentalism, linking it to her upbringing. Jones emphasized that Thomas“saw herself surrounded by creativity from an early age, from her mother's use of color as an expert seamstress to her extended family's planting and working of southern soil.” Both critics suggest that Thomas's connection to practical arts like clothing and food production fostered her experimental, or what Jones terms,“Afro-Futuristic” approach.

Powell's use of“cornrows” in describing Thomas's color fields evokes both agricultural fields in North America and a distinct African diasporic hairstyle. The chapter explains that cornfields in the United States share a“colonized kinship” with African laborers. Conversely, cornrows as a hairstyle have faced criminalization under racist labor codes post-emancipation. However, Powell's positive review highlights liberation and nourishment within Thomas's art, seeing her“parboiled” but never overcooked images as a“reclamation” rather than a lament for labor.

The text also draws a connection between Thomas's practice of“sistering,” a generative challenge of simultaneous similarity and difference, and the role of her younger sister, John Maurice Thomas. Maurice, who lived with Alma their entire adult lives in Washington, DC, acted as an archivist and curator of Alma's work. Her meticulous notes on photographs and event programs clarified Alma's presence and achievements, preserving an intimate witness to her sister's legacy.

Artist Malcolm Peacock is also mentioned, having studied puppetry at Teachers College, where Alma Thomas also studied. Peacock, while at the Studio Museum's transitional studio space, applied his mother's living room cornrow technique to braiding a redwood tree. He noted his marathon braiding sessions sometimes kept him in Harlem late into the night, akin to African hair-braiding establishments.

The book's excerpt ultimately argues that Alma Thomas's paintings, with their bright brushstrokes and the spaces between them,“do not only beckon our minds, they open up our crowns,” as Powell suggests with his cornrow reference. The text concludes by linking Thomas's patterned multiplicity to heirloom Cherokee corn grown at Tierra Negra Farm in Durham, North Carolina, and the Indigenous planting system of the“three sisters,” where corn, beans, and squash grow together.

Source: Hyperallergic

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