I’m returning from a little break into the mountains of Colorado where I enjoyed the cooler weather and a dip in a hot spring. This summer I turned 65. I celebrated my 40th wedding anniversary. This week is my 10 year anniversary of being retired from a career teaching art in public schools .
With a lot of planning and some good luck along the way I was able to leave a profession I loved with enough income to pursue what I have always loved,art. When I retired I wanted to relax for a year, but instead life got hectic. I had to pack up and move from a our family home to relocate nine hours away in the desert of Nevada. When I unpack all the boxes into a temporary space in our vacation home and started a started a new chapter, the desire to create was undeniable.
Over the past ten years I settled in Southwest Utah where I have a nice studio and time to work consistently developing a body of work. I feel like I am in my 30’s instead of my 60’s. I am almost at the point in my artist development of where I would’ve been had I stepped out of college, not gotten married, had kids, or taken the secure path by choosing to use my degree to teach in a public school. I thought I would make art on the side and eventually become a “real” artist.
As it turns out, the idea of becoming a full-time studio artist while working full-time in the classroom and raising a family was magical thinking on my part.
Alma Thomas is my kindred spirit. Like me, she retired from a career teaching middle school art students. Like me, she created work when she could during her teaching career. She took an entirely new creative path when she no longer had to enter the doors of a school. Alma Thomas truly blossomed in the last third of her life
Alma Thomas
(Copyright: © Michael Fischer, 1976; Courtesy of National Museum of American Art)
Alma Thomas was born in 1891 in the south. Her family moved north to Washington DC to allow Alma and her siblings to live without the burden of a culture that was not only discriminatory but dangerous. She graduated high school in 1911 and entered college to get a teaching certificate, which she achieved in 1914.
At the time there wasn’t a degree in art education available for Ms. Thomas. That did not stop her. In 1921 when she was 30 she entered Howard University as the first student in art education. In 1924 received a bachelors degree. The following year she began teaching art at a junior high school in Washington DC where she remained for three decades.
While teaching she continued her education going to the Teachers College at Columbia Universtiy in New York City in the summer. She graduated with a masters in art education. In 1943 she and others formed the first African-American privately owned Gallery in DC. Alma continued her development as an artist in a critique group called “The Little Paris” that encouraged fellow artists and created a network of contacts.
1957 26 x 34 Johnson Collection
Two years before her retirement, Ms. Thomas visited Europe and upon returning started to study at the American University where she worked within the color field movement*. It was there that she moved from searching for her voice to being able to building a portfolio that would lead her into the world of museums, galleries and serious collectors. She retired in 1960. By 1966 she had her first retrospective of 34 works. At the age of 81 she was Honored with a solo show at the Whitney Museum of Art.
* “In the latter half of the 1950s, Washington D.C. saw a flourishing of abstract art that emphasized the form-making capabilities of pure color. Known as The Washington Color School, the loosely affiliated group of abstract painters knew each other through various teaching experiences. The moniker has an uncertain origin but likely originated with the title of a 1965 exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, "Washington Color Painters," curated by Gerald Nordland.” quoted from The Art Story
1970 acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
A long time friend said that Alma was simply percolating through those years before she retired. Alma explained her success outside the artist age norm this way: “Creative art is for all time, and is therefore independent of time.”
Alma Thomas didn’t begin to work in abstract style uniquely her own until she was in the last third of her life. In her first six decades she was a keen observer of the contemporary landscape in the art world. She remained intellectually open to new ideas. It was almost as if she had been collecting inspiration and when the time was right, she had built up enough energy to fully express herself.
In the fall of 2014 I was a few years into discovering the art quilt movement. Using a sewing machine and a paint brush reminded me of work I created in college. When I submitted a large piece for the BFA exhibition at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1981. It was a sewn painting. I remember using my mothers old Singer Featherweight to make pleats to form lines, precise lines; that organized a wild abstract into something different. At the time, the serious students in the department were working with masking tape, acrylics, and abstraction to form very large and very controlled compositions. My canvas was a nod to those straight lines using a tool assigned to my gender: the sewing machine.
Fast forward to 2008 the practical reason for my interest in art quilting was linked to a Reading Rainbow video that featured Faith Ringgold. In the video, she describes using quilting to address the issue of mailing large work to venues.( If you don’t know, it is extremely expensive to ship a stretched canvas) Her solution, suggested by her mother; was to not stretch her paintings but rather to treat them like a quilt which would hang beautifully and allow her work to be rolled up and shipped economically in a tube.
Before I retired I can’t honestly say that I was interested in the process of quilting. Quilters are, unlike me; technique enthusiasts. I was a painter and a mixed media artist, who was more interested in using the process of layering and stitching to create work that challenged the conventions of fine art.
Like Alma, a couple of years before retirement I was planning to dive into a serious studio practice.
Like Alma, I invested some time and some money into going to workshops, conferences and joining organizations to expand my understanding of a new way of working.
Like Alma I had a great deal of pent up creative energy to release.
Victor 1906 - An early experiment of mine in mixed media stitched work. 2011
Looking back, if I had taken the next step after getting my bachelors degree by submitting my portfolio to a masters program at a prestigious school, I might have been able to land a teaching position at a university. There was a much smaller chance that I would land a really good agent or a big name gallery. Today I have the opportunity to take these 10 years of honing my portfolio and without the burden of needing an income stream, I can now free myself to take that portfolio of work and find a place to share it.
As Ms. Thomas expressed; Art is not a prisoner of time. Artists are not bound to follow a predetermined calendar . There is no exclusive privilege of youth to challenge norms, or to create something unexpected. Like my kindred spirit Ms. Thomas; my dream does not have an expiration date.
Until Next Time
Margaret
Thank you! Wonderful stories!