Primary: After and with Alma Thomas

Primary: After and with Alma Thomas - Hardcover

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Primary: After and with Alma Thomas
  • Primary: After and with Alma Thomas
Primary: After and with Alma Thomas - Hardcover

Primary: After and with Alma Thomas - Hardcover

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
$30.00
$30.00

Book Overview

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.

Number of Pages: 176
Dimensions: 0.73 x 9.5 x 6.43 IN
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
ISBN9780300279306
Author Alexis Pauline Gumbs
PublisherYale University Press
GenreBiography, Education, and Arts
FormatHardcover
PublishedSeptember 2026
LanguageENG- English
Pages176
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Art Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction Social Science

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About Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry and of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers' Award in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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