Red Emma’s

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.

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.

Joël Díaz is a writer, educator, and steward for arts and culture committed to storytelling, community building, and creative placemaking. With leadership expertise spanning arts administration, public programming, publishing, and non-profit management, he has helped organizations champion artists and expand community access to the arts. He is currently the Executive Director at The Clifton House.