The Politics of Space: Alma Thomas And Race Relations in 1960’s America

This project uncovers and investigates political aspects of the 1969-72 Space Series by Alma Thomas (1891-1978), an abstract expressionist, African-American woman artist. Scholarship on Thomas concentrates primarily on the formal elements of her works, such as the unusual brush strokes and vibrant color palette the artist employed throughout her oeuvre. The abstraction that characterizes Thomas’s work has led scholars to define her as an apolitical artist. Created during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the space series demands to be read in relation to cultural and political understandings of space exploration at the time, which reveals the works’ political dimensions. To this end, I consider Thomas’s transition from her previous earth and nature-based works to space-based themes, the significance of depicting space in an abstract idiom, as well as the political implications of the locations in which she displayed the space series. Ultimately, I argue that Thomas’s space series represents a post-racial future. In this way, her work takes its place beside that of other artists working at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement whose work explicitly engaged the values and strategies of these initiatives.