Bo Bartlett features The Columbus Museum exhibition "Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful' in this week's episode of local radio show ArtHaus.

Columbus Museum Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Kristen Hudson, joins WTVM's Maureen Akers on Business Break to discuss the upcoming event, Alma W. Thomas 131st Birthday Celebration on Thursday, September 22.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful toured major museums all across America for the past year before coming here, the artist's hometown, for its grand finale.

Two major retrospectives just opened at the Columbus Museum in Columbus, GA, to shed light on Alma Thomas’ exceptional life and career. The exhibitions will be on view through October 2022.

Following a 12-month, multi-city tour along the east coast, the acclaimed exhibition will make its final stop in Thomas’ native Columbus, where it will be on view from July 1 – September 25, 2022. This amazing exhibition, offers a compelling overview of Thomas’ trajectory from childhood to international recognition. With more than 150 objects, from her rarely seen marionettes to her well-known abstract paintings.

The Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, has just announced the launch of Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas exhibition that highlights the life and work of renowned artist Alma Thomas, a native of Columbus. Alma achieved fame in 1972 at 80 years old for her bright and joyful paintings that resemble mosaic masterpieces. Alma was the first Black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum in NYC. She was also the first African American woman to have her work added to the White House Collection. The exhibition opened on May 21 and runs through Sunday, October 2, 2022.

“Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful” is a comprehensive overview of the life and career of African American artist Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978) that includes her well-known abstract paintings, rarely seen marionettes, and late-career paintings that have never before been exhibited or published. The show opened July 1 at the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia.

The Columbus Museum is proud to announce the opening of Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, a comprehensive exhibition of renowned artist Alma W. Thomas’ extraordinary career with more than 150 objects, from her rarely seen marionettes to her well-known abstract paintings.

Alma Thomas’s paintings create portals into other worlds through color and form. And though the late artist, who died in 1978, is now regarded as a seminal painter of Abstract Expressionism, her first major museum solo exhibition did not arrive until she was 80.

On May 21, The Columbus Museum will open Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas, an exclusive, historical exhibition that uses rare family artifacts to tell the story of one of the Chattahoochee Valley’s most famous and beloved artists.

According to Amanda Gilchrist with The Columbus Museum, Sand Unshaken will open on on May 21, 2022 and will run until Oct. 2, 2022. It is meant to complement another art exhibition named Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, opening on July 1, 2022.

Renowned artist Alma W. Thomas’ (1891-1978) artistic journey took her from Columbus, Georgia, to international acclaim. The traveling exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful offers a comprehensive overview of her extraordinary career with more than 150 objects, including late-career paintings that have never before been exhibited or published.

Frist Art Museum executive director and co-curator of the Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful exhibition, Dr. Seth Feman, discusses one of his favorite pieces from the show and gives us a closer look at Alma's subtle, yet dynamic brushwork.

“Beauty will save the world.” Dostoevsky expresses this artist statement through the words of the fictional character, Prince Myshkin- the titular character of The Idiot, published in the late 1860s. Myshkin was, in some ways, a stand-in for what Dostoevsky might consider the best version of himself, a “positively good and beautiful man.” The prince was not what Dostoevsky claimed to be but possibly what he aspired to become.

It was a 19th-century song that piqued Day Al-Mohamed’s interest in a little-known group of Union soldiers in the U.S. Civil War. It was not a celebratory song.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful provides a fresh perspective on the artist’s long, dynamic life (1891–1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity. This major retrospective traces her journey from semirural Georgia to Washington, DC, to becoming the first Black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York when she was eighty in 1972.

“Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful,” on view at the Frist through June 5, is a welcome balm to our weary souls. And this is no accident. Thomas was a revolutionary artist and educator who cultivated beauty and creativity in all aspects of her long life. And she was dedicated to bringing that same energy into the lives of others, as well.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos rocketed into outer space this summer, which ignited conversations about the usefulness of space exploration. Bezos’s space tourism is an ego-driven display of wealth and privilege that did not benefit anyone. However, through sheer imagination, Alma Thomas fantasized about space exploration as a metaphor for Black liberation.

Stephanie Bedell, the Suffolk Public Library collection strategist senior librarian, accepts the Suffolk Art League’s 2022 book donation of the Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog.

When Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was just fifteen years old, she moved with her family from the Jim Crow South to Washington D.C., where she cultivated a life as an artist and educator. A traveling retrospective exhibition, “Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful,” is touring the country, revealing the striking evolution of Thomas’s work throughout her career. The show was put together by cocurators Jonathan Frederick Walz, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art at The Columbus Museum (Columbus, Georgia), and Seth Feman, Deputy Director for Art & Interpretation and Curator of Photography at Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art.

NASHVILLE, TENN.- The Frist Art Museum presents Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, a comprehensive overview of the artist’s long, dynamic life (1891–1978) and multifaceted career that was defined by constant creativity.

Following from its commitment to reflect the communities of the Chattahoochee Valley, The Columbus Museum continues to augment its holdings of works by African American artists. The Museum’s recent Alma Thomas Society Annual Purchase Party resulted in the acquisition of two new works to its permanent collection.

Presented by Seth Feman (Deputy Director for Art and Interpretation and Curator of Photography at Chrysler Museum of Art) and Jonathan Frederick Walz (Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art at The Columbus Museum), learn more about the Frist Art Museum’s Everything is Beautiful exhibit in this virtual program. Jonathan presents on Alma W. Thomas’ marionettes and Seth shares more about her teaching practice.

It’s only fitting that a retrospective of Alma Thomas’s art be named “Everything Is Beautiful.” The more than 170-work exhibition charts Thomas’s career from her understated still lifes to her kaleidoscopic abstractions, underlining the beauty she saw in the material world and imagined in a cosmic one.

Abstract Expressionism was a movement dominated by male artists. Painters such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning have held centre stage as the stars of the movement, leaving many female abstract expressionists in their shadows – their work overlooked and underappreciated. One of these artists is Alma Thomas, a painter, educator and the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition of her work in the Whitney Museum of Art.