ArtBeat: Alma Thomas @ Skidmore’s Tang Museum [Get Visual]

Review by David Brickman

I wonder what Alma Thomas’ public school art students thought when, in 1972, their teacher – retired and elderly – became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The idea of an artist being that important and, yet, having had to teach school all her life is far from unique, but this extreme case is certainly food for thought. Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs has, in a sense, rescued this delightful painter from obscurity a second time with a sharp, spacious presentation of about two decades’ worth of her work (on view through Sunday, June 5) in a show simply titled Alma Thomas.

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