A01=Alexis Pauline Gumbs
abstract
Abstract Painting
African American Studies
Alma Thomas
Art History
audre lorde
Author_Alexis Pauline Gumbs
beauty club
black art
Black Biography
black feminism
Category=AB
Category=AGA
Category=AGB
Category=AJCD
Category=AMB
Category=DNB
Category=JBSL1
colorblind
community art
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
meditations on art
Twentieth Century Art
Product details
- ISBN 9780300279306
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 10 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, scholar, educator, and community builder. Her books include Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She has received the Whiting Award in Nonfiction and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry. Gumbs lives in Durham, NC.
