Primary: In the Light of Alma Thomas

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300279302
• ISBN13: 9780300279306
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 224 Pages