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  • Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas by Jeanne Walker Harvey
  • Elizabeth Bush

Harvey, Jeanne Walker Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas; illus. by Loveis Wise. HarperCollins, 2022 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063021891 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8

Alma Thomas spent her earliest years in 1890s Georgia soaking in the colors that surrounded her home and dabbling in clay sculpture and paint. Although her parents tried their best to immerse the family in literature, art, and a broad worldview, they realized that the South offered few educational and cultural opportunities to Black citizens, so they relocated to Washington, D.C., where Alma earned degrees in art and dedicated most of her life to art education for children. As she neared seventy, she returned to her own creativity and unleashed a startling new style of emotive, mosaic-like patterns of vibrant color, drawing from her childhood fascination with nature and from a fast-turning world that put people into space. Unlike many artists whose acclaim arrives posthumously, Thomas enjoyed her success, attending solo exhibits of her paintings at the prestigious Whitney Museum and Corcoran Gallery. That "Alma did not live to see the momentous day—when the first Black president and First Lady chose Alma's painting as the first artwork by a Black woman to be displayed in the White House" closes her story with a single bittersweet episode in a tour de force career. Wise's digital art pops with color and features slightly abstracted figures, mirroring but never mimicking Thomas' visual explosion of hues. Author and illustrator notes, a timeline integrating Alma's story with United States events, sources, references, and quote citations are appended.

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