© COPYRIGHT

by

Cynthia Hodge-Thorne

2019

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For Patricia, Gwendolyn, Janay and Rebecca

THE POLITICS OF SPACE: AND RACE RELATIONS IN 1960’S

AMERICA

BY

Cynthia Hodge-Thorne

ABSTRACT

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.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was made possible by the support of many people. I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Nika Elder for her patience and guidance in this writing process. Her dedication and support consistently pushed me to think more creatively and critically about Alma Thomas and abstraction. I would also like to thank Dr. Juliet Bellow, Dr. Joanne Allen, Dr. Andrea Pearson, and the rest of the faculty in the Program at , for their advice and encouragement. This project would not have been possible without the loving support from the wonderful women in my life, my mother, grandmother, aunts and cousins. It was their steadfast belief in me that helped push me through my darkest moments. In addition, I would like to thank my classmates for their kind words, jokes, and friendship, for which I will be forever grateful.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...……....ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………..……………………...….iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………..…v

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………..………...... 1

CHAPTER 1: A PRE-HISTORY OF ALMA THOMAS’S SPACE ……...5

CHAPTER 2: A NEW WORLD FORMED BY AN ABSTRACT VISION OF SPACE…………………………………………………………………………………...17

CHAPTER 3: THE POLITICS OF DISPLAYING SPACE…………………………….29

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………...... 42

ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………………………....44

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………...... 45

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Arts Center at American

University.

Figure 1. Alma Thomas, Air View of a Spring Nursery, 1966…………………………………...44

Figure 2. Alma Thomas, Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers, 1968………………………....44

Figure 3. Claude Monet, Wheatstacks (End of Summer), 1890-91………………………………44

Figure 4. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-70…………………………………..……….44

Figure 5. Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967…………………………………….….44

Figure 6. Alma Thomas, March on Washington, 1964……………………………………….….44

Figure 7. Alma Thomas, Lunar Rendezvous- Circle of Flowers 1969…………………………..44

Figure 8. Lunar Orbiter Earth image, 1966……………………………………………………....44

Figure 9. Atlas Rocket Blast off, 1962…………………………………………………………..44

Figure 10. Mariner 4 Mars image, 1962…………………………………………………………44

Figure 11. Lamar Dodd, The Cosmos Awaits, 1970………………………………………….….44

Figure 12. Alma Thomas, A Glimpse of Mars, 1969…………………………………………….44

Figure 13. Stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stargate Sequence, 1968…………………...….44

Figure 14. Stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stargate Sequence, 1968……………………....44

Figure 15. Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise, 1970……………………………………..….44

Figure 16. Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859…………………………………….44

Figure 17. Barbara Chase- Riboud, Malcolm X, 1969………………………………………..….44

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INTRODUCTION

Alma Thomas’s career as an artist did not begin until her late 60s. Until her retirement in

1960, she spent most of her adult life as an art teacher at Shaw Junior High School in

Washington D.C..1 She entered the art world with the unusual perspective of someone who lived their formative years in the Jim Crow era in southern and experienced post-war social changes in Washington D.C., where she resided as an adult and produced her art. Her work has often been most appreciated for its bright colors, fragmented and disjointed brush strokes, and abstract interpretations of nature. The large canvases create visions of the outside world in saturated blues, reds, and yellows, through rhythmically aligned patterns that the artist termed

“Alma stripes.”

Most scholarship on Thomas posits that the artist’s work was unconcerned with social issues and, furthermore, that it was apolitical—much as the scholarship on the Abstract

Expressionist artists describes the art of painters in this group. Many studies on Thomas, such as those by Nikki A. Greene and Bridget R. Cooks, focus on the formal qualities of the artist’s style, including her investment in abstraction and pure colors. In a related vein, scholars have written about the density of Thomas’s paint, which distinguishes her work from the Washington

Color School, a second generation of Abstract Expressionist artists who were active in

Washington, D.C. from the 1950s through the 1970s. Their works were characterized by flat planes of pure color, geometric forms, and stained canvases. Less often discussed is what it meant for Thomas to have created works of this kind as an African-American woman artist.

Among the few studies in this vein are those by Jonathan Binstock and Anne Gibson, who explore the artist’s work through the lens of social history. Binstock considers Thomas’s choice

1 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. , . 1

of abstraction as a modernist tactic that attended to social injustice, in this case to racial bias, in the art world. Gibson, on the other hand, interprets Thomas’s color theory and style as political acts. She contextualizes Thomas’s style in relation to the politics of Abstract .

This thesis expands upon the scholarship of Binstock and Gibson to offer a socio- historical and, in particular, a political interpretation of Thomas’s work in the context of the space race and the racial politics around it. My focus is a body of paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s known as the “Space Series.” The series was inspired by advancements in space exploration by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo Program. I will place selected works from the Series in conversation with other images by Thomas and situate them within the context of American race relations of the time, including the racist politics of space, in order to reveal the significance of this subject to an abstract artist of color in the 1960s and 1970s. Contextualizing Thomas’s work within the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that paralleled NASA’s Apollo Program, as I will do, is not intended to deny other influences and interpretations. Rather, this thesis demonstrates how notions of race figure into the Space

Series and into the way the public understood it.

The first chapter addresses Thomas’s sudden rejection of the natural world in favor of the celestial world as the primary subject-matter for her work. In this period, Thomas went from creating nature-based works like Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1969) to space-themed works such as Splash Down Apollo 13 (1970). I argue that this shift in subject-matter was inspired by the politicization of nature at the time as well as the assassination of Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr.. Combined, these developments prompted Thomas to change her attitude towards —whereas the nature-based works were an escape from reality, the space series would confront it, if indirectly.

2

The second chapter outlines the politics of space in general and for Thomas. Reading A

Glimpse of Mars (1969) in relation to official depictions of space produced by NASA as well as the portrayals of space produced by various artists at this time, I argue that abstraction enabled

Thomas to picture space as a post racial utopia. Whereas NASA and the artists it supported pictured space exploration as scientific feat and technological accomplishment, for Thomas, as for Afro-futurist writers, space was a place of unlimited creative and social opportunity.

The final chapter addresses the political significance of the Space Series in the context of the institutions in which it was displayed: historically black universities and prominent, primarily white art galleries and museums. I will show that in the context of display, the works messaged black opportunity to black audiences at historically black colleges and universities and black inclusion to white audiences at major art museums. By investigating the contexts in which

Thomas’s work was seen, the chapter illuminates the political imperatives behind them.

The conclusions of this project may seem at odds with the position of the artist, who held that her work was unrelated to the “ugliness of the world.” Indeed, certain writers have described

Thomas as a modernist “universalist,” who believed that transcended time, age, and race. Thomas’s own words reflect this position: when asked if she thought of herself as a black artist, Thomas replied, “No I do not. I am a painter. I am an American.” While it is important to acknowledge these claims, they must be put into their historical context before ascribing them too much weight. During the period in which Thomas worked, the 1960s and 1970s, the art world was deeply segregated. Works by black artists were sometimes interpreted as if bound by imposed racial limitations, with no regard to artistic skill or merit. Identifying as a “black artist” invited the imposition of politicized assumptions. Thomas must have understood this context even as she publicly denied its impact; perhaps she denied it as a means of resistance. Whatever the case, now that scholars of race history are revealing how opportunity for American black

3

artists was limited by systemic bias, it is time to revisit the assumptions underlying Thomas’s position and to reassess the Space Series within this new framework.

4

CHAPTER 1

A PRE-HISTORY OF ALMA THOMAS’S SPACE PAINTING

Alma Thomas is most well known for her nature-themed paintings or “Earth works,” as the artist described them.2 These are paintings of an abstract style, with bold color palettes, unique brush strokes and titles relating to flowers, seasons and other natural elements. The bright saturated hues and her patterned brushwork reflect Thomas’s impressions of nature as she saw and experienced them in her daily life. These Earth paintings were created throughout her career, accounting for the qualities for which Thomas is best known.

But, in 1969 Thomas—who continued working with comparable abstract shapes, “alma stripes,” and color palettes—stopped titling these works after nature and, instead, started titling them after celestial phenomena. The transition from Earth to space, while inspired in part by the space race, has its footing much firmly set into the ground. Thomas’s views on nature and her subsequent rejection of the nature world were influenced by developments in the art world as well as political events in the —some in her own backyard, D.C.. In the art world, there was a developing fight for representation of minorities in the museum and in museum administration that corresponded with the fight within politics for civil rights and equality for minorities. In Washington D.C especially, the city had become a hotbed of political activity and activism, frequently the site of historic protests and civil disruptions, that often teemed over into the developing art community. The confluence of these circumstances establishes a foundation for thinking of her space paintings as political.

2 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 5

Earth as an Escape

The views of nature that Thomas presents in these “Earth works” are very much inspired by her daily life and environment. The attention to Thomas’s own natural environment is expressed most clearly in works like Air View of a Spring Nursery (1966)(Figure 1). The painting shows what Thomas would imagine a spring nursery would look from an aerial view.

The colors are displayed across the canvas horizontally. The blues, indigos, reds, greens and other colors create pattern lines throughout the entire composition. The rows of color in the fragmented brush strokes give the impression of flowers seen from above. The broken lines from the brush strokes represent the multitude of flowers in the nursery Thomas is portraying.

The Earth works Thomas creates, from the titles to the color palettes, represent the occurrences within nature that Thomas saw in Washington DC. Thomas develops the titles as the artwork develops, changing and improving them as the painting grows, reflecting her understanding of the impact text has on the interpretation of an artwork. With titles like Air View of a Spring Nursery and End of Autumn, Thomas brings natural elements of the Earth clearly into her canvas. Thomas’s direct associations to the natural world with words like “spring nursery” and “autumn” evoke specific meanings of growth and change, as well as the seasons, which she believed enhanced the relationship of colors, specifically with autumn giving “overwhelming, luscious, strong colors to the earth to enrich man’s soul, seemingly relieving him of the hardships he encounters in life.”3 The growth and different phases of the Earth indicated by “autumn” are referenced in the titles of her natural works and locates the viewer as well as the context of the painting strictly on the ground. The specific area is unknown, but Thomas situates this work somewhere residing within the confines of the earthly realm.

3 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 6

The beauty of nature was a significant factor in Thomas’s artistic intentions, and the nature-themed paintings that were produced provide much context to the space paintings that followed. Thomas found a beauty in nature that contrasted what she said was the “ugly things in life,” like the racial injustices and violence faced by African Americans during this struggle for civil rights, and she created impressions of what this beauty looked like to her.4 In Breeze

Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968) (Figure 2), Thomas presents an impression of flowers whizzing through the fall breeze. The unique “dabbing” brush stroke that Thomas had named

“Alma stripes” are employed here, along with the vertical pattern orientation create this image of movement and stirring of the flowers.5 The variation in the colors like red, blue, brown, green and yellow are used here by Thomas to represents the selection of flowers in the environment during this fall season, expressing the changing leaf colors and blooming flora. In this work,

Thomas continues to link the natural world and the beauty of its variety. The colors rain down from the top of the canvas, creating a veil like view of the flowers and their dance like movement. Thomas created repeating lines of reds and blues and yellows as well as the other shades present in this work in a way that showcases the movement of the breeze rustling through the fall flowers.

Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers reads as an adaption of the techniques and theories of Impressionism as well as Thomas’s understanding of art, color and light. In this painting, the gradient of shades and hues in the flowers shows an attention to the correlation between light and color as it appears to Thomas. The yellow tones in particular, shine through the patterns of the composition, representing streaks of sunlight that move across the flowers. Thomas’s own consideration of the painting in various lights represents her focus on the formal qualities and life

4 Thomas, Alma, Berry, Ian, and Haynes, Lauren. Alma Thomas. New York, New York: The , 2016. 5 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 7

of a painting. She admired the life of the painting as it changed from the morning light to afternoon light—similar to French Impressionist artist Claude Monet’s series, such as Haystacks

(1890). In this series of over 30 works, Monet painted the same subject at different points in the day and year over a two-year period in Giverny, a village in the north of France, to understand the transience qualities of art. The series as a whole was to express the “true and exact” aspects of reality and light.6 The paintings of Haystacks in full sunlight, midday, and covered in the winter snow, revealed the atmospheric effects of nature on a subject, but also the relationship between light and color.

Comparing Thomas's work to Monet helps reveal her interest in nature as opposed to his.

This comparison is apt because both artists produced series focused on nature and Thomas very well have seen Monet's work at the National Gallery’s spring 1966 exhibition French Paintings from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce, which included 9 works by Manet.7 Thomas takes on the experiments of Monet in her use of color and her appreciation of light, which she calls “the mother of color.”8 With her short abrupt brush strokes, her abstraction is more stylized than Monet’s Impressionist style. The clearest message from

Thomas’s nature works, Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers in particular, is the appreciation of color. In works like Wheatstacks (End of Summer) (1890-91) (Figure 3) Monet explores a range of greens and yellows as they are affected by light. Thomas departs from the influence of the Impressionist master with her solid colors which have absorbed all their brightness from light. The abstraction that Thomas produces as a recreation of this display from light appears on the canvas as well as in Thomas’s own understanding of the properties of a painting changing,

6 Monet, Claude, and Daniel Wildenstein. Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978. 7 (U.S.). 1966, French paintings from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce; Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, 1941-1966 Washington 8 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 8

“All you have to do is put natural light on them,”9 referring to the saturation and brightness of the colors, an impact caused by the inherent light.

The observational quality of the Earth works also hold much significance for the artistic vision of Thomas. The view of nature that she creates as a result, interprets both nature and the power of light in a harmonious way to combine Monet’s experimentation with atmospheric effects and her own exploration of color. Color for Thomas, created a pure interpretation of the things she observed, signifying the emotional significance of the natural experience. According to her former professor, artist , Thomas was colorist in the way she employed bold, saturated colors, finding new interpretations of color and paint that were inspired by her experimentation with popular color theories from art history, but with her own personal twist.10

Art Historian Lowery Stokes Simms argues that Thomas’s use of color bridges both Minimalist and techniques in the artist’s ability to represent repetitive forms and shapes.11 Sims also makes note of the influence of color theories from and Johannes Itten on

Thomas’s use of color.12

Notably missing from Thomas’s impressions of nature are any specifics to the locations that inspired them. No formal characteristics, styles or themes anchor this work to the world around it. This feature distinguishes Thomas from the impressionists that she was inspired by.

Monet was interested in specific sites. By contrast, Thomas’s landscapes evoke the universal beauty of nature. She generalized the experience in order to posit nature as an escape. By not pinning it to a particular site, her work did not connote any social issues. Breeze Rustling

Through Fall Flowers, for example, is more about the relationship of color and light, along with

9 Munro, Eleanor C. Originals : American . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. 10 Thomas, Alma. Alma W. Thomas : A Retrospective of the Paintings. 1st ed. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998. 11 Sims, Lowery Stokes, “Alma Thomas: Regional Force, American Great,” in Alma Thomas: Phantasmagoria, Major Paintings from the 1970s, exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery Publications, 2001). 12 Sims, Lowery Stokes, “Alma Thomas: Regional Force, American Great,” in Alma Thomas: Phantasmagoria, Major Paintings from the 1970s, exh. cat. 9

the natural beauty found in the world around Thomas. The visible white canvas appearing in between the strokes of bright, saturated range of colors including reds, greens, blues and yellows.

The stripes of color running vertically down the canvas, almost appears brighter due to the white canvas dividing the lines. The relationship of the color as it creates this image of a breeze rustling through fall flowers is the focus, rather than the specific world Thomas lived.

As an African American woman, Thomas was very much cognizant of the social issues and struggles of minorities like herself, such as segregation and discrimination laws. Thomas’s family had experienced racial violence at the hands of racist citizens in her hometown of

Columbus Georgia; during her early years as a child, a lynch party came near their home in search of a black man, but backed away once recognizing Thomas’s father, John Harris Thomas as “the most respected negro in Columbus.”13 According to Thomas’s mother, Amelia, the event caused a deafness and speech impediment in the artist at her birth.14 Having personally experienced racial injustice and violence since childhood, Thomas found nature to be a relief from the evil she and other African Americans faced in her life as the segregation and violence towards African Americans something she dealt with her entire life.15

Thomas took to portraying the nature that she observed instead of the reality that she lived and leaving any reference to where she lived absent. The nation’s capital, at the time a city with a significant African American population and a significant force of control over all race relations, is absent from the environment Thomas represents in her nature works.16 Not only is

Thomas leaving out the specifics of the environment, but in doing so, she removes the specific ugliness and oppression within society that she experienced in Columbus and in Washington, to

13 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 14 Munro, Eleanor C. Originals : American Women Artists. 15 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 16 Prince, Sabiyha. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. : Race, Class and Social Justice in the Nation’s Capital. Farnham: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. 10

only be left with the beauty of nature. Thomas pointedly portrayed nature to convey this message about paint and nature, and not the outside world from which the problems of society resided.

Changing Views on Nature

Thomas’s turn away from nature was due, in part, to changing ideas about nature that impeded its ability to serve as an escape from politics. In the 1960s, artists started using the Earth itself as a canvas itself. This new wave of art was called Land Art, which the first exhibitions on such work often referred to as “Earth works” and “Earth art.”17 It combined interest in the physicality and materiality of the Earth with modernist critiques of the art world and art institutions, but it also coincided with growing interest in environmental issues and concerns.

Suzaan Boettger, an art history scholar chiefly focused on Land Art, argued that the “Earth works” of this early time “embodied ambivalent responses to the anti-institutional position of so much of late 60’s culture and fused them with conflicted behaviors towards the natural environment.”18 At this time, issues such as air and water pollution, pesticide poisoning, and solid waste disposal, among other things, had become an increasingly popular concern for

Americans. The canonical artists who worked in this vein were Robert Smithson, Michael

Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Richard Long. All of them used the Earth as their medium and canvas. These artists often created sculpture works of found and scattered rock, dirt and other earth materials, in remote locations. Scholars saw these works as addressing the environmental concerns of the time, such as the impact of industrialism on the planet, and the temporality of the

Earth.

17 Kaiser, Philipp, and Kwon, Miwon. Ends of the Earth : Land Art to 1974. Los Angeles, California: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012. The first landmark exhibitions truly focused on these Earth works were the 1968 “Earthworks” show at the Virginia Dan gallery in and the 19969 “Earth Art” exhibition held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 18 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 11

Artists like Smithson and Long created site-specific sculptures that lived and often times died in nature. This style was influenced by conceptualism, with many artists stemming from this movement, and , with its dedication to the materiality of industrial materials and simplistic geometric forms. Drawing from these two traditions, Land Art often questioned the relationship between man and nature by introducing industrial forms, materials, and technologies to create these Earth works. The relationship between man and nature is especially seen in

Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70) (Figure 4), a work in which the artist created two large trenches located in the Moapa Valley on Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada. The work displaces over 24,000 tons of dirt to create the two straight long 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep trenches, forming negative spaces within the Earth.19 The artwork is a testament to the negative impact of man on nature, removing and displacing the nature world, leaving only negative space.

This physical and empty mark on the Earth both brings attention to man’s intrusion and damage on Earth, and literally brings art back to nature from a time when art was seen as removed from society.

Richard Long’s 1967 A Line Made by Walking (Figure 5) also explores humanity’s impact on nature. Long created this Earth work by physically and literally making a mark in nature by repeatedly walking back and forth in a line. Long’s line also represents the human impact on the Earth and humanity’s ephemerality as the work was quickly expunged with the new growth of the grass. The rejection of traditional sculptural forms in its site specificity, as well as through its ephemerality and the method in which it was created, A Line Made by

Walking further comments on the way in which humans use and abuse nature. It represents the way in which human activity literally marks the Earth.

19 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. 12

Land art commented on the changing views of within the art world that had been cultivating with conceptual art, critiqued art institutions, and visualized the relationship between man and nature itself. Art critics during this time connected developments in Land Art to the environmental movement and the rise in public awareness over humanity’s impact on

Earth.20 Their writing joined books like Rachel Carlson’s 1962 Silent Spring, which was an environmental science book that spearheaded the environmental movement in its condemnation of pesticides for their harmful effects on the environment and wildlife. The popularity of Silent

Spring during this time forced a change in environmental practices, eventually causing the

United States to suspend the use of harmful pesticide DDT.21 The popularity of this book and environmental causes in general prompted critics to see a relationship between Earth works and the politics of the environmental movement. In describing a work by Robert Morris in which

Morris displayed industrial material that had been repeatedly slashed to ribbons, critic John

Perreault said the work was a testament to the viability of Earth as a living organism and the living Earth which was susceptible to destruction.22 The ravaged industrial materials represented the physical destruction they produced on the Earth and the overpowering force of the Earth to destroy them while they were used to destroy Earth itself. Other critics continued this parallel, relating Land Art to ecology, saying that the works returned to nature in a way that redeemed the sins of civilization.23

Land art is understood as a reaction against the modernist view of art being disengaged from the world around it. For decades, artists, particularly abstract artists, had focused on the

“modernist” object—be it a painting or a sculpture. Historians see Clement Greenberg as an origin for this impulse; in his essay “Modernist Painting,” the critic argued that each medium

20 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. 21 Hynes, H. Patricia. The Recurring Silent Spring. 1st ed. New York: Pergamon Press, 1989. 22 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. 23 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. 13

“criticizes from the inside,” basically divorcing the development of art from any broader socio- historical concerns.24 In his landmark essay, renowned Land artist Robert Smithson, argues that describing and labeling art as “timeless” increases its commodity value.25 Smithson felt that this distance from the outside world that Greenberg celebrates was a fallacy and a limitation. The qualities of much land art, such as its site specificity, prevent them from being “timeless,” securely placing the artists within the politics of their time.

Removing the work from the institution and placing it into the real world connected it to the world and time. Often referred to by critics as a “return to Earth,” Land art significantly reconnected art to the world around it and politicized the presence of nature in art 26 Land art made nature into a canvas but also brought immense attention to the impact of man on nature, from the use of industrial devices in its creation, to the physical mark created from man’s presence, exemplified in Heizer’s Double Negative and Long’s A Line Made by Walking. Land

Art was understood by many at this time as a political statement on the intrusion of man onto the

Earth, which disrupted Thomas’s view of nature within art. At this point, nature was no longer a reprieve from the issues of society in the way that it had previously been for Thomas, now it was an irrefutable reflection of the politicization of nature.

Changing Political Landscape

In 1969, with no explanation, Thomas stopped titling her works with references to natural phenomena. Nature did not change, and the tree outside Thomas’s window remained the same, but her interest changed, and nature no longer served Thomas in the way it previously could.

24 Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture : Critical Essays Boston: Beacon Press, 1965. 25 Smithson, Robert., and Flam, Jack D. Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 26 Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks : Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. 14

Nature had become a politicized site and, so, could no longer serve as a reprieve from politics.

Thomas had described her motivation for creating art as “wanting to paint the beauty of the world instead of man’s suffering,” with “man’s suffering” referring to the economic struggles and specifically racial struggles, likes segregation, that drove American society at the time.27

While she continued to avoid painting suffering and negative aspects of the world that many people, mostly African Americans endured, she still wanted to offer a world—or at least hope— beyond it, particularly as race relations in the United States reached a violent apogee.

The event that triggered Thomas’s focus on politics occurred on April 4, 1968, when Dr.

Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The political activist was in

Memphis in support of the 1,300 garbage collector strike when he was fatally shot while standing on a hotel balcony.28 Historian Ron Everman argues that Dr. King’s assassination caused a civic divide between black and white, young and old, and conservative and progressive that was similar to the divisions that resulted in the Civil War. Significantly, riots in major cities like

Chicago, Baltimore and Kansas City erupted following the assassination. In Washington DC, in particular, the riots began as a mourning campaign by Stokely Carmichael, who convinced storefronts in the majority African American area of 14th and U St to close out of respect of Dr.

Kings death.29 Unfortunately, this led to a violent uprising, sparking the most destructive days in the history of the district, causing twelve deaths and over 7,600 arrests.30 The violent reactions following Dr. King’s assassination impacted the nation in various ways, further dividing the

27 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. 28 Eyerman, Ron. The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination From MLK and RFK to Fortuyn and Van Gogh. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011. 29 Johnson, S. S. (2015). "Free D.C.": The Struggle for Civil, Political, and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., 1965–1979. 30 Johnson, S. S. (2015). "Free D.C.": The Struggle for Civil, Political, and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., 1965–1979. 15

nation, but also prompting a considerable legislative effort in the form of the Civil Rights Act, which had previously been halted by the House Rules Committee.

The assassination of Dr. King left a void in the nation, contributing to what historian Ron

Eyerman described as evidence of the “sickness” that America had.31 In this context, as demonstrated by her shift in subject matter, Thomas decided to use her art as a vehicle to imagine a way forward. Thomas’s interest and admiration of Dr. King and his efforts in the Civil

Rights Movement are clearly demonstrated in her only explicitly political work, March on

Washington (1963) (Figure 6). This painting was inspired by Dr. King’s historical March on

Washington for Jobs and Freedom Protest in which he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. It depicts what the front lines of this protest would have looked like: large crowds of people with signs. The abstract work shows people in blurs, undefined faces and bodies of different races and genders standing in support of Dr. King’s March on Washington protest. This portrayal of Dr.

King’s most famous and well-known speech as a political activist is a clearly political painting that memorializes the protest. Thomas, a Washington DC native, was either present at this march or, thanks to media and press surrounding the event, had knowledge of the March; she possibly even had friends that participated. She used this historical event as motivation for this painting which was one of the last figurative works of her career. During this time in which Thomas was finding her way towards a more abstract style, this is the only instance in which she pictures any explicitly political subject matter, revealing how much Dr. King’s violent assassination meant to her as an African American woman, but also how much it meant to her as an artist.

Thomas was struck by Dr. King and his assassination as well as the way the nation was dealing with the effects of his death. Although she left no writings and made no statements to this effect, the assassination clearly spurred the artist’s shift in subject matter—for, in its wake,

31 Eyerman, Ron. The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination From MLK and RFK to Fortuyn and Van Gogh 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011. 16

she stopped titling her works after natural phenomena and started titling them after cosmic ones.

In Lunar Rendezvous- Circle of Flowers (1969) (Figure 7) Thomas begins her ascent into this celestial focus. The “lunar rendezvous” she is referencing is the moon landing. After nearly a decade of preparation and failed attempts, on July 21, 1969, NASA successfully brought a man to the moon, and Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon’s surface. This vision of space Thomas provides in Lunar Rendezvous- Circle of Flowers is a reaction to the success of the Apollo 11 mission and the inspiration it provided to many Americans. The shift away from nature represented in this work marks the beginning of Thomas’s rejection of the natural world, moving away from an Earth on which men are shot to the possibilities of outer space. Moving away from depictions of nature and to depictions of outer space enabled Thomas to adjust to the shifting political landscape—both changing attitudes about nature (specifically the growing tide of environmentalism) and the violent end to Dr. King’s peaceful protests.

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CHAPTER 2 A NEW WORLD FORMED BY AN ABSTRACT VISION OF SPACE

Starting in 1969, Thomas’s work took a dramatic turn. She still produced abstract works of the same style but the titles now alluded to space. Glimpse of Mars offers a typical example.

In this painting, Thomas presents a glimpse of the red planet, a quick fleeting image that has movement and rhythm. Glimpse of Mars is interesting in that this portrayal explores color and design within abstraction, but it also challenges the view of space that people all over the world, including Thomas, actually saw. NASA’s images of space circulated widely at this time. Photos and television coverage showed the moon, outer space, and never before seen perspectives on

Earth to the American public.

NASA’s success in space exploration suggested that anything could be possible, but the appeal of space was also due to the hope that American ideals and cultures would be continued in this new world.32 Artists at the time—particularly those sponsored by NASA—found solace in this new realm of possibility and in the idea of continuing the American tradition of exploration.

They found inspiration from the images of outer space that NASA produced and published during this time. The images reflected a view of space and of NASA that corresponded with the messages that the organization wanted to instill within the American public. The images also introduced the science and technology of exploration and aeronautics to the mainstream public.

In its abstraction, Thomas’s Space Series stands apart from the images of space that

NASA had released from their various expeditions exploring the galaxy in their quest to the moon. Rather than American progress and patriotism, her work—like the writings of Afro- futurist authors—imagined space as post-racial utopia. Formal experimentation became a way to

32 McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. 18

imagine and envision an unknown word—one that might be free from worldly strife. As a black woman living in 1960’s Washington D.C, Thomas was aware of many of the racial, economic, and international problems afflicting Americans at the time, specifically people of color, and saw space as an alternative to it.

NASA’s Views of Space

Following the second World War, with new aeronautic machines and equipment, the

United States and the Soviet Union recognized space as the new frontier. Conquering this frontier became a nationalist goal. Indeed, the space race emerged from the tensions and competition between these two states. During this tense political time, the United States and the

Soviet Union were involved in what was called a “space race,” in which each nation tried to beat the other in a competition to make it to outer space and, thereby, to prove national superiority.

Photos of the moon and of outer space were significant products that came as a result of this space race. According to space policy and NASA expert Howard McCurdy, the photos from space of the moon and of Earth made a large impact on society and helped Americans shape and imagine their future at a time when much of the world was changing.33 Space, from the way the

NASA presented it, was a new frontier—a new land to conquer.

The first image of the Earth from the moon came in 1966 from the Lunar Orbiter, a robot monitored by NASA.34 The black and white image (Figure 8) shows the moon’s surface as well as the Earth in the background. The top half of the Earth is illuminated but the bottom half is drenched in darkness, disappearing into the void. The entire world was able to see and

33 McCurdy, Howard. "Has Spaceflight Had an Impact on Society? An Interpretative Framework." In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, 3-16. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2007. 34 Conway, Erik M. “Satellites and Security: Space in Service to Humanity" In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, 267- 288. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2007. 19

experience this view of the Earth and take from it a new understanding of the universe beyond their own planet. This black and white image of the moon portrayed the astronomical body very closely and in great detail. The moon is shown as an extraterrestrial entity—a scientific body far removed from the one that appears in the nights sky. The images that depicted the Earth’s surface and the moon floating in the unknown vastness of outer space represented a new world to viewers—a new world that was still wrapped in mystery and uncertainty.

These pictures were very popular and highly visible on TV and in newspapers.35 The astronauts who commanded these journeys—men like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn Jr.— helped to shape the public perception of the space race; they put a face on the program and quickly became celebrities, representing “American” values like patriotism and bravery.36 The image of John Glenn Jr. and the Atlas Rocket that transported him into the Earth’s atmosphere, where he orbited the planet three times, was shown in most newspapers (Figure 9), including the

New York Times. These images asserted NASA’s success, but often acknowledged that the U.S. was lagging behind the Soviet Union in space exploration.37 Indeed, the nation trailed behind the

USSR in making its way into outer space, launching NASA after the success of Sputnik, the

Russian satellite, which created a sense of urgency to catch up to the communist state. Science journalists like Andrew Chaikin, maintain that President Kennedy, in setting forth the mission to get man on the moon, saw this as an opportunity to “best the Soviet Union and show the world the strengths of a free society.”38

The photos picture the moon as an abstract, foreign object, which was often described by

NASA officials as a “vast, lonely and forbidding sight.”39 The abstract and scientific

35 McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. 36 McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. 37 Witkin, Richard. "Glenn Orbits Earth 3 Times Safely." .. 38 Chaikin, Andrew. “Live from the Moon: The Societal Impact of Apollo.” In Societal Impact of Spaceflight, 53-66. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2007. 39 Wilford, John Noble. "Astronauts Examine 'Vast, Lonely' Place; Read From Genesis." The New York Times. 20

interpretations of the moon from these photos highlighted and emphasized NASA’s and, by extention, American’s ingenuity. But they also made this foreign entity more familiar. The photos of Mars from the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1962 furthered this effort. Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to successfully complete a flyby of Mars and brought back images of the neighboring planet.40 The images of Mars brought more information than ever before recorded about the planet but left many more questions unanswered. The planet (Figure 10) was obscured and disjointed, with the crater-filled surface of Mars only partly visible.

The images of space that NASA released helped assert its own authority and relevance.

They signaled America’s success, but also made a case for the work that was left to be done— there was much more to learn about the moon, Mars, and rest of the galaxy at large. Similar to the survey expedition photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan from the 19th century, which documented lands, organisms, and plants in the American west, these photos of space also celebrate this new domain, while still demonstrating the need for further examination and discovery of outer space.

Other Representations of Space

During the space age, in addition to issuing photographs of space, NASA launched an art program. It began in 1962 with visual artists from all over the country being awarded grants of

$800 and invited to create whatever they wanted in response to NASA sites, missions, and explorations. For example in 1963, artists were given the opportunity to watch the launch of the

Mercury Project—the first human spaceflight program from the country.41 This partnership provided selected artists with unparalleled access to NASA but, more importantly, it provided

40 Mariner-Mars 1964, NASA, SP-139, Wash., D.C., 1967. 41 Dean, James D., and Ulrich, Bertram. NASA/Art : 50 Years of Exploration. New York.

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NASA an opportunity to work itself into American culture. Ostensibly, the goal of this program was to “record the physical appearance of the strange new world which space technology is creating, but… edit, select, and probe for the inner meaning and emotional impact of events which may change the destiny of our race.”42 But, in reality, its purpose was to offset public consternation. The nation’s exploits in space exploration came with a large price tag. The NASA art program was meant to mitigate these concerns by touting the national significance of space exploration.

To this end, the artists in this program, described as “missionaries” by head of the NASA

Art program, James Dean, created works responding to early experiments in spaceflight.43 In order to shape and influence the public’s perception of NASA and the space program, the director of NASA, James Webb, initiated a campaign to use the fine arts to capture the excitement and energy of the achievements of the space program. In a memo to his staff, he wrote they should consider “the field of the fine arts to commemorate the past historic events… as well as future historic events that we know will come to pass.”44 This relationship with the fine arts was applauded by many, particularly those in NASA who felt that while photographs could capture the achievements of the space program, artists could communicate its significance.

Take Lamar Dodd’s The Cosmos Awaits (Figure 11), for example. In this work, Dodd portrays a rocket launch as a technological marvel. Dodd creates an image in a grid of nine sections that representing the rocket’s blast off in the center section. In this way, he emphasizes the technology that created this opportunity, which again speaks to the triumph of American ingenuity. He employs dull blues, orange, and brown tones in this large ranging color palette.

The natural tones and the divided composition speak to the physical experience Dodd had while

42 Dean, James D., and Ulrich, Bertram. NASA/Art : 50 Years of Exploration. New York: Abrams, 2008 43 Dean, James D., and Ulrich, Bertram. NASA/Art : 50 Years of Exploration. New York. 44 Dean, James D., and Ulrich, Bertram. NASA/Art : 50 Years of Exploration. New York. 22

watching the various rockets blast off during his time as a NASA artist. Of attempting to capture this moment, Dodd said:

I could not be satisfied with a technical display of craftsmanship to capture the landscape, a Mercury or Apollo-Saturn sitting on a pad with the gantry and service tower, or even in that dramatic moment of blast off. This world was entering in a new phase, and I realized I was watching and experiencing the making of history. As I confronted a piece of paper or a canvas, it was clear that a literal drawing and technique had to yield to the drama of a new era being born.45

The Cosmos Awaits is Dodd’s attempt at portraying the excitement of what is to come, but this excitement is centered on technology.

Alma Thomas’s Artistic Vision of Space

Alma Thomas was not associated with the NASA art program and, so, moved away from this emphasis on technology. Instead, the space series, though inspired by the journeys of NASA and the images that they produced, offers an extremely subjective vision of space itself . The contrast between Thomas’s images of space and the works officially promoted by NASA show how Thomas’s portrayal was meant to represent more than just space, it was meant to depict a new world associated with the limitless opportunities of outer space. A fictional world produced by Thomas’s own imagination and inspired by the possibilities that space might afford. Space was an arena of experimentation in which anything Thomas imagined, both in art and in society, could be made real.

The new utopian world that Thomas creates in her 1969 painting A Glimpse of Mars

(Figure 12) portrays a view of the neighboring planet that is very different from the images taken by the Mariner 4. Thomas’s planet most noticeably is a colorful rendition of the planet. Mars is portrayed with a color palette of saturated colors. The composition is dominated by pinks and

45 Dean, James D., and Ulrich, Bertram. NASA/Art : 50 Years of Exploration. New York. 23

reds appearing in vertical lines over the canvas, with shades of navy blue and dark purple lines relegated to the outer sides with a small appearance of green peaking out from the pinks and reds on the right side. The bold color palette, the fragmented “alma stripes,” and significantly elements of her drafting process visualize the experimentation that cosmic subject matter afforded her.

The bold colors were a continuation of her artistic style, but, in the context of outer space, also represented an experiment in creating an imagined view of space. Specifically in Glimpse of

Mars, the pink and red colors set her view of the planet apart from the way it appeared in official black and white images published by NASA. In Thomas’s portrayal of Mars, the unblended colors shine brightly upon the white, unpainted canvas. Thomas orients the paler blues and pinks in between the darker reds and navy blues. The relationship between the colors and their bright hues offers a view of the red planet that Thomas has imagined to be vivid and passionate and lively.

Continuing Thomas’s experiments in the creative possibilities of space, the Alma stripes complete the entire canvas of Glimpse of Mars, creating a fragmented vision of the red planet.

Through the fragmented brushstrokes, the painting has a sense of movement that suggests a quick view of the planet, with the redness breezing across the canvas. This work is not only an imagined view of planet Thomas has no experience with, but it is shown with movement and activity.

The world presented in A Glimpse of Mars is created from Thomas’s unique artistic style and exemplified what she thought the planet and space could be. It was a space of creative possibility—both formally, but also politically. Rather than being bounded by the realities of nature, space gave Thomas the ultimate freedom to experiment. Pencil sketch marks are visible throughout many paintings within Thomas’s space series. The pencil marks, often appearing in

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straight, measured, grid like lines behind the strokes of paint, demonstrate the mathematical approach Thomas considers in her process. The technical approach is common for the artist with the pencil marks appearing in many if her earlier earth works, but again, in the context of space, references the undeniable associations to science and its connotation of advancement. The technical approach is especially interesting in that, in many of the paintings in the space series, including Glimpse of Mars, the artist, despite her somewhat technical planning and sketching, paints over the lines with colors. In Glimpse of Mars, there are shades of blue that have been painted over with a dark shade of purple.

Thomas’s stylistic representation of this glimpse of Mars was a manifestation of the artist’s imagination of space. The color palette and the stripes create an imagined view of the planet and, as a result, produce this abstract view of space itself. This unique vision of space further distances this series and her representation of space away from the real and true images of space that had been circulating. Space offered Thomas a way to create what she had never seen firsthand rather than recreate things she already saw. In this way, it gave her the opportunity to create an alternate world.

During the 1960s, the counterculture movement emerged. Americans were becoming more and more disillusioned with long-established values and ideals, including gender roles, sexuality, and consumer culture. As people struggled with social issues like the war, poverty, environmental threats, and , utopian communities emerged, proposing new societies, away from civilization. Theses experimental societies were created based on ideas of peace, free love, and political protests in states such as Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, California. One of the most popular utopian communities during this time was Drop City. Founded in 1965 in

Colorado, it was described as a place where people could do what they wanted, with a

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philosophy opposed to corruption, authority, and power in favor of cooperation.46 Drop City was a revolutionary experimental city that was free and open to anyone that came there and set the stage for the many utopian communities that can after. In the same way that Drop City provided its inhabitants a free society that did not have the social issues of urban life, space offered

Thomas freedom to experiment and, in this new world she created, all things pictorial and social were possible.

Amidst these developments in space and the counterculture, black science fiction authors increasingly turned to space to envision a post-racial world. Authors used space as a site for navigating social, gender, and racial concerns and ideologies and posited space as a site of escape. The combination of racial tropes and futuristic fantasy is afro-futurism—a genre in which space and the imagined world is an alternative to the oppression experienced by African

Americans on Earth. African American authors like Samuel Delany sought to represent black characters in this new sphere—not as tokens, but as multifaceted people. In his “The Einstein

Intersection,” Delaney created characters like Lo Lobey and other protagonists who were black and experienced significant character growth. Afrofuturism in literature and in other mediums created accessible visions of blackness in intergalactic settings in which the black imagination was free to experiment in space and avoid oppressive realities. Afrofuturists were optimistic in their world building, creating stories in which racial issues were resolved. The utopia created by the Afrofuturists and by Thomas was a hopeful escape, a new world that did not look like their own and solved the issues they couldn’t.

46 Robinson, Paul H., and Robinson, Sarah M.. Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers : Lessons from Life Outside the Law. Herndon: Potomac Books, 2015. 26

The Stargate Sequence

Thomas was not the only artist to experiment with the creative potential of space. Stanley

Kurbick’s film 2001: A Space Odysessy also pushed boundaries in depicting this subject and, significantly, helped shaped the entire genre of science fiction. It is regarded as one of the most influential films in history—critics often describe it as the “ultimate science fiction movie.”47

The film’s impact on history came from its imaginative depiction of space and the way it pictured the relationship between humans and technology. Arguably the most remarkable scene in the movie, the Stargate Sequence, portrays the main character, David Bowman, transiting through multiple dimensions and times, leading to his transformation from a middle-aged

Capitan to an elderly man.

The Stargate Sequence stands out in the film due to its astonishing depiction of space.

During the transitions of the Stargate sequence, Bowman is bathed in different lights and color patterns as his pod rockets through space. The scene, often described as “psychedelic,” visibly compares to the visions of space Thomas was creating. Stills from this scene (Figure 13 and 14) show the saturated colors and the fragmented pattern they created during the sequence. The similarities between the scene and Thomas’s paintings are clear formally. The bold colors and the patterns in which they appear, are the most clear parallels. The experimentation Thomas pursued in her colorful rendition of space is similar to the psychologically transformative scene

Kurbick created in the Stargate Sequence. For both artists, space enabled them to imagine an alternate world and experiment in ways that representations of Earth precluded.

It is significant to note that Thomas, while painting the space series, had a recorder playing sounds from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, along with recordings from a

47 Benson, Michael. Space Odyssey : Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. 27

National Geographic record called “Sounds of the Space Age from Sputnik to Lunar Landing.”48

The sounds fed Thomas’s fascination with space exploration and her imagination of space, with the Thomas once saying that she wanted similar sounds playing at an upcoming exhibition.49 The desire to combine both senses, sound and sight into her display of space speaks to the way in which this subject afforded her room for experimentation.

Though the film is historically revered for its scientific accuracy in depicting spaceflight, the psychedelic nature of the Stargate Sequence is more akin to Thomas’s expressive paintings than NASA’s official photographs. The photographs from the Apollo program were interpreted in both the Stargate Sequence and Thomas’s space series as personal, inventive examples of the endless potential for creativity offered by outer space. Kubrik and Thomas take influence from the innovations of the Apollo Program in the creations of their new worlds, paying homage to the advancement that led to their new world, but more importantly, acknowledging the potential for liberation and freedom both creatively and socially that is offered in outer space.

A few years later, in 1974, the film science fiction film Space is the Place demonstrates the possibility of outer space as a site of black liberation from the racial issues of current society.

Participating in the rise of black-focused science fiction films, Space is the Place follows Sun

Ra, a famed jazz musician, visiting Earth and attempting to rescue African Americans from the upcoming destruction of the Earth and take them to a planet away from the oppression of white

Americans. Space is the Place offers an interesting commentary on race relations. In the end,

African Americans in the black community of Oakland, California are transported to Sun Ra’s spaceship to a planet without white people, while Earth is destroyed. In his book “Black Space:

Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film,” African American studies scholar Adilifu Nama asserts that Space is the Place “envisions black liberation as intergalactic travel and the

48 Jervis, Ida. “Magic Windows of Alma Thomas,” The Art Scene 1, no.3 (Summer 1971): 14-15 49 Jervis, Ida. “Magic Windows of Alma Thomas,” The Art Scene 1, no.3 (Summer 1971): 14-15 28

fulfillment of black peoples’ desires as achievable only on another planet that is absent of whites.”50 While space is a “black-only” utopia for Sun Ra in Space is the Place, Thomas’s version represented in A Glimpse of Mars is a utopia absent of the injustice and open to everyone. Thomas’s vision of space is a free utopia of endless possibility.

Conclusion

Alma Thomas’s paintings bear no similarity to the images of Mars, the moon, or space in general that NASA made public. Instead, she actively working hard to “paint creatively” and produce a fictional world.51 For her, space was a springboard for pictorial experimentation, but also for social justice. This new world was utopian in its aspiration for a better and more perfect society as a response to her own.

50 Nama, Adilifu. Black Space : Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 51 Thomas, Alma, Berry, Ian, and Haynes, Lauren. Alma Thomas. New York, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2016. 29

CHAPTER 3

THE POLITICS OF DISPLAYING SPACE

Before a joint session of congress on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed putting the first man on the moon.52 In suggesting this unimaginable feat, President Kennedy framed space as the final battle between tyranny and freedom that had been fought around the world. Following the second World War and the increasing political tensions with the rise of communism, the transition to space came at a time in which there a sense of urgency in reinforcing the ideals of democracy and freedom. A victory in outer space, would be a victory of the nation and a symbol of the “freedom” we possessed, in the history books. This victory, as

President Kennedy explained would be come at the heavy cost of $531 million dollars, would take a national commitment of government agencies that may already be spread thin and did not have a guarantee of success.53 Being completely transparent with the risks of this goal, Kennedy stressed the importance of a feat of this caliber when the Soviets already had a head start in space, as well as the national triumph of the United States achieving putting a man on the moon and safely returning him home. This would be a national victory for every man would work to get him there. Kennedy said “Space is open to us now” and called for Congress to support this goal of getting the United States there.54

President Kennedy was correct on the sentiment that this goal would take several years.

The United States did not successfully put a man on the moon until the end of the decade in July

29, 1969. Significant smaller steps on the path of American space exploration were made in the

52 Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. President's Office Files. Speech Files. Special message to Congress on urgent national needs, 25 May 1961 53 Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. President's Office Files. Speech Files. Special message to Congress on urgent national needs, 25 May 1961 54 Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. President's Office Files. Speech Files. Special message to Congress on urgent national needs, 25 May 1961 30

course of this very momentous decade in which the nation was dealing with. One of these steps being NASA’s Project Gemini, a spaceflight program dedicated to understanding how to put a man on the moon and developing techniques and skills to complete the exploration safely. The

Gemini Project marked some of the most significant feats in American space flight. One of these being NASA’s Gemini 4 Mission on June 3, 1965, in which astronaut Ed White became the first

American to walk in space, an undeniable contribution to the success of Neil Armstrong’s historic moment on the moon a few years later. The Gemini 4 mission was celebrated all over the country as a major step forward to getting man on the moon, jumpstarting conversations on the

Gemini 5 mission, which took off August 21, 1965.

Just ten days before NASA made another enormous step in the path to get man on the moon, along with giving America a “lead” in the space race against Soviet Union with this

Gemini 5 mission, social turmoil in Los Angeles reached a historic boiling point. While astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad and Gordon Cooper orbited the earth for eight days, the Watts community in Los Angeles was still recovering from one of the deadliest riots in United States history. The nation in fact, was still trying to understand the causes and ramifications of what occurred during the six-day riot in California while Conrad and Cooper were blasting off in

Florida. Questions on how this occurred in one of the largest cities in the country rather than the racial hotbed of the American south where this attitude is common, as well as how it escalated to the magnitude in which it did, were major concerns for the nation. While the advancements made in America’s effort in the space race and in Kennedy’s goal of getting a man safely on the moon were being made, the nation was struggling with a more public, immediate, and arguably more important race problem that those at Cape Kennedy had the unique and exclusive privilege of escaping from and ignoring.

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The Watts Riots of August 1965 was just a single event in a long timeline of noteworthy events of civil rights and black liberation during the 1960s, most significantly following the assassination of Malcolm X and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham

Alabama.55 What began with as a traffic stop for driving while intoxicated, escalated into acts of police brutality, with spectators erupting into a violent crowd due to reports of a police officer assaulting a pregnant woman. The resulting days of riots were fueled not only by the violent traffic stop, but also by residential segregation and police discrimination, which resulted in the death of 34 people, 25 of them black and over $40 million dollars of property damage.56 The

Watts riots demonstrated the inequality, poverty and brutality of the Watts community and sparked a national shift of attention to the prevalence of these issues in most black communities.

The issues of inequality and racial prejudice exhibited in the riots were the primary focus for many all over the nation, even during the triumphs of NASA’s Space Program. The message of empowerment in the face of the social, economic, and political oppression of African Americans were felt, understood and encouraged all over the country. Artists of all mediums aligned themselves with the issue of black struggle and liberation, campaigned and used their work to advance this cause and express symbols of black identity and resistance. Artworks of this period embraced an explicit and direct association to the politics of this era, engaging in furthering the intersection of art, activism and politics.

At this politically charged moment, the series of space inspired works by Alma Thomas appear apolitical, in both their theme and style. Rather than focus on the prevalent social issue of racial justice, these works shift attention from the concerns of race to the star and celestial phenomena of outer space. Despite their seemingly apolitical appearance, when placed in context

55 EDY, JILL A. "Real-Time News: Covering the Watts Riots and the Chicago Convention." In Troubled Pasts: News and the Collective Memory of Social Unrest, 22-58. PHILADELPHIA: Temple University Press, 2006. 56 Jeffries, Vincent, Ralph H. Turner, and Richard T. Morris. "The public perception of the Watts Riot as social protest." American Sociological Review (1971): 443-451. 32

with the debate of the importance of the space race, as well as the institutions in which they were displayed, the underlying political content and message of the space themed works become clear.

Thomas had the advantage of operating in black spheres as well as white spheres, having exhibited in both explicitly black institutions like historically black universities and at white institutions like leading New York art museums. Considered in light of the exhibition programming in these seemingly disparate venues, Thomas’s space paintings send distinct messages to these two audiences. To black viewer the space series signified black opportunity and potential; to white viewers it signified black inclusion to the age of advancement. In this way, although Thomas’s work departs from that of her peers who explicitly addressed the racial trials and tensions of the moment, her paintings engage with these issues via abstraction and the meanings it assumed in black and white spaces of display.

Space in Black Sites

In 1971, when she was still creating the space series, Thomas’s work was shown in exhibits at and at Morgan State University, historically black universities in

Tennessee and Maryland, respectively. Thomas’s exhibit at Fisk was one of the first times the space series was shown to the public.57 Organized by cultural luminary and Thomas’s friend

David Driskell, the exhibition featured her previous nature themed works, along with a small grouping of the space paintings Thomas had created by that point, including Snoopy Sees a

Sunrise (This painting is often referred to as Snoopy Sees a Sunrise on Earth. Within her )

(Figure 15).58. The space themed works were shown to an audience comprised of many staff and faculty members of Fisk University, people who would have been familiar with the same racial

57 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 58 Peanuts character, Snoopy was the official safety mascot for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since 1967. The character was symbolized in a pin that was present on each astronaut’s space suit. 33

prejudices and struggles as Thomas; witnessed the assassination of Dr. martin Luther King Jr that occurred in Tennessee just a few years prior; and been keenly aware of the scientific advancements made through NASA as well as the politics around them. The audience at

Thomas’s exhibition in December of 1972 at Morgan State College was very similar to the audience at Fisk. The Morgan State exhibition, called “Black Matri-Images,” was a collection of works from prominent African American women artists, highlighting the role of black women in the black arts community.59

At these institutions, Thomas is providing a way for this audience to associate themselves with outer space and space exploration. She both brings space and the idea of potential within space exploration to a black audience, desegregating space and making it accessible to this black audience. The vision of space Thomas displays in Snoopy Sees a Sunrise brings space to a community and an audience that was not included in the established narrative of space and space exploration, giving them the accessibility that was denied in other areas of society. At Fisk

University and Morgan State College, Thomas places the black audience both in the role of the astronauts that had the experience of seeing the sun rise above Earth, as well as the role of white

Americans who could connect and identify with this ability and scientific advancement.

Politics of Space

During this time of racial tensions, war and prevalent social violence, space was an unexpected topic for work to be shown in black art spaces. Both the American government and its media had framed space as white environment, for white people. President Kennedy said to congress that “Space was open to us now”.60 The question posed by many in opposition to both

59 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 60 Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. President's Office Files. Speech Files. Special message to Congress on urgent national needs, 25 May 1961 34

Kennedy’s goal and the entire NASA space program was, who is included in the “us”? At a point when the nation was not entirely open to all of its citizens, who was space really open to? The struggle to end segregation occurring throughout the nation shows that public spaces were not available to everyone, and there was a very clear and distinct racial divide in environments as well as in accessibility. The demographic of people given the opportunity to explore space and to contribute to achieving this goal of getting a man to space proves that the “us” space was working towards reflected the segregation that the nation was dealing with in public spaces.

Space, despite its physical distance from the everyday life and from the people in direct struggle, had similar political impact in that it was another space denied to African Americans.

In the context of black art spaces, Alma Thomas’s work would read in a way similar to the work of the afro-futurists science fiction authors; it did not envision a post-racial world, but it did explore if and how space could be relevant to black audiences. Thomas bring space to black audiences in a way that creates a new world of exploration that has been available to this audience. At Fisk and Morgan State, space was presented as a place African Americans could freely experience. Operating in the same lens as afro-futurist science fiction authors, Thomas sought to place black people in space, removing the “whites only” exclusivity that society had placed upon it, including black people in the opportunities awarded in this “new world.” She was clearly aware of the racial politics around space and, in showing the space series at these institutions, sought to intervene into them.

Opposition to Space

By depicting space in this way, Thomas suggested the possibilities of space exploration to an audience understandably frustrated by it. African-Americans saw the space program as

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another way in which the government had abandoned and neglected it.61 On July 15,1969, the day before the launch of Apollo 11, this opposition was clear and very public with a demonstration led by the Poor People’s Campaign at Cape Canaveral. The demonstration was led by president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Ralph Abernathy who organized 25 poor black families with mules and wagons to the Kennedy Space Center.

Abernathy’s goal in this demonstration was to show how the progress of the space program had left many unresolved problems on Earth since the scientific advancements and money dedicated to the program could be used to eradicate poverty in the United States.

Abernathy’s demonstration at the Kennedy Space Center was the most well covered protest of NASA’s Space Program, but it was just a moment in a long series of public opposition and unrest, as opposition to the space program infiltrated the arts during this time.62 The most significant cultural product to come from this opposition was “Whitey on the Moon,” a poem by black author Gil Scott-Heron, that addresses his disapproval with the space program while he and other blacks were living in poverty. Heron, in this critique on the use of funds and the attention on the space program instead of issues of poverty go uncorrected, echoes the same sentiment of the protestors by saying:

The man jus' upped my rent las' night.

('cause Whitey's on the moon)

No hot water, no toilets, no lights.

(but Whitey's on the moon)63

61 Maher, Neil M. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017. 62 Maher, Neil M. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. 63 Scott-Heron, Gil. "Whitey on the Moon." Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970). 36

Many African Americans around the country related to the same struggles of health and economic peril while being frustrated with the government’s focus on the stars.64 Despite

Thomas’s opinion of outer space as a realm of possibilities, the general consensus of the space program for blacks at this time was that it represented everything that America the nation did not allow for blacks.

Snoopy Sees a Sunrise in particular addresses these disparities between the opportunities afforded to white astronauts at the expense of African-Americans. Thomas is presenting a view of space that she is assuming the astronauts would have experienced. She is placing herself and the viewer in the place of the astronaut, flying over the Earth, watching a sunrise. Thomas is commenting on the achievement of seeing the Earth from space, while also relating it to what is seen as an ordinary event on Earth. This view that Thomas creates demonstrates what could be, but more specifically, a view that African Americans, at the time, would have had no chance at seeing. Indeed, NASA was a distinctly “white” environment; only 3% of its employees were people of color and most of them were employed in low-wage positions.65 Snoopy Sees a Sunrise is Thomas’s way of giving African American access to space. To a white audience, this view could be a possibility, or at the very least, they could identify with those that achieved it, but through Thomas’s hands, she places African Americans in this position.

Space in White Sites

In spring of 1972, Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York City. This was turning point in Thomas’s career, having given her an opportunity to showcase her work to the New York art world. The Whitney

64 Maher, Neil M. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. 65 Maher, Neil M. Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. 37

Museum, considered one of the nation’s premier art institutions was a quintessentially white, male in both its programming and its staff that put on the show such as its , 66 The audience of the Whitney exhibition would have been professionals in the art field, and Thomas’s exhibition came at time in which black art in was seldom presented in these sites.67 The exhibition at the Whitney Museum came as a part of the museum’s response to critics from artists of color in the New York art community to represent and support more African American artists. As such, solo exhibitions of prominent and under-supported black artists were held in the

“Lobby Gallery.”68 It is significant to note the that these exhibitions, while allowing the museum to show black artists and have the perception of a more progressive institution, the “lobby gallery” also continued the distinction between these artists and the artists allowed in the upper galleries. Despite the continued discrepancies, for the artists, these exhibitions were a strong endorsement from a respected institution.

Thomas’s retrospective exhibition here was just months after an exhibition of Eastman

Johnson paintings. Johnson, a nineteenth-century white American artist, Johnson is known for genre paintings that often showed African Americans in poverty and struggle. A quintessential example is his 1859 work, Negro Life at the South (Figure 16), which shows the domestic lives of enslaved people in a decrepit, rundown home in Washington DC. Not only does this painting show African Americans in a state of poverty and struggle, but the decrepit state of the home portrayed in the painting reflected the old way of life, an outdated way of life, that represented the historic and current injustices that blacks were struggling against with the Civil Rights and

Black Power Movements. By contrast, Thomas’s space series, which the museum displayed in

66 Thomas, Alma. Alma W. Thomas : a Retrospective of the Paintings. 67 Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 68 Cahan, Susan. Mounting Frustration : the Art Museum in the Age of Black Power. 38

the space for black artists, associated African Americans with advancement, science, and the space program.

In the same year, Thomas had another retrospective exhibition in Washington DC at the

Corcoran Gallery. This exhibition reinforced Thomas’s standing as a formative figure in the

Washington art world. Like the exhibit at the Whitney Museum, this exhibition at the Corcoran, further associated blacks with space by publicizing Thomas’s race with her space themed works.

Thomas’s focus on space was highlighted in the reviews as a transition from her Earth works, marking a noteworthy subject change in her career. To a white DC audience, this message of inclusivity in space was significant in that, this was Thomas’s home and space, in terms of the laws and developments regarding exploration were controlled in this city.

Mainstream art institutions reflected more of the government ideals and biases than the black institutions that were on the margins of the artworld. Art historian, Susan Cahan argues that the Black Power Movement caused a demand for integration that impacted institutional practices in the past and continue to impact them today. Thomas’s exhibition in majority white institutions at the time was momentous, signifying the change and acceptance that was beginning to take place in the mainstream art world. To a white audience, Thomas’s space series associated

African Americans with the advancements and progression of space exploration. Presenting works like Snoopy Sees a Sunrise, to a predominantly white audience at a major white art institution, interrupted and countered the programming (of nineteenth-century art, for example) that continued to associate African-Americans with slavery.

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Space in Conversation with Political Art

According to historian Neal Harry, the late 1960s and early 1970s were rife with activism in the streets, but also in art.69 Much of the art being created, especially by African American artists, related in some way to the various causes sweeping the nation, the Civil Rights

Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement and the Anti-War

Movement. Artists supporting these causes addressed the themes and symbols of these movements to associate their work with these issues and advocate for change. Artists like

Barbara Chase-Riboud, an African American female sculptor, took to her art to create works that honored political activist Malcolm X. In a series of largescale works made of bronze, cotton, and yarn, Riboud created monuments to honor Malcolm X, who had been assassinated in 1965.

Malcolm X #3 (1969) (Figure 17), for example, is a large gold toned work that—through the paired materials (bronze and cotton)—showcases the hard-edged persona and softer hidden personality of the activist as well as the strengths and struggles of the black community. This work challenges the public understanding of this activist who was described as a militant figure and an “embattled racist” by the New York Times and, in turn, can be read as a monument to his ideals of black unity and liberation.70 Works by other artists like Spiral’s Romare Bearden created photomontages of black life. Bearden’s photomontage series like Prevalence of Ritual showed everyday rituals, contradicting the images of struggle and violence that were circulating in the public. Bearden’s images while, not expressly political, were inspired by Martin Luther

King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and addressed themes of blackness and black identity.71

69 Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." The Drama Review: TDR (1968): 29-39. 70 “To Arms With Malcolm X,” New York Times, March 14, 1964 71 Pruitt, Sharon, “The Spiral Group: Defining African American Art During the Civil Rights Movement” Conyers, James L., Jr. Engines of the Black Power Movement : Essays on the Influence of Civil Rights Actions, Arts, and Islam. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2006 40

Ideas of black experience and of resistance were the messages that these black artists who created works in line with the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement artists wanted to convey to their audience, no matter the population of which it was comprised. They pictured the events and people of these movements, but also used their work as manifestos of sorts to relay the goals of black unity, black freedom, the black aesthetic. The goals of these works were to redefine blackness in relation to African heritage and history and in contrast to negative images of African Americans circulating in the media. For black audiences, these messages would have been empowering, whereas, to white audiences the works would have been educational. Though Thomas’s work was seemingly apolitical in its style, the context in which it was shown, places it in conversation with the explicitly political works of the time. Thomas’s space spoke differently to different audiences. For the white audiences, the space themed works were meant to associate African Americans with the scientific advancement and, for black audiences, the space themed works granted them access to a world from which the government had excluded them. In this way, Thomas participated in one of the most contested issues of her day. Her work did not look as explicitly political as did Chase-Riboud’s monuments or

Bearden’s photomontages, but that was the point. Abstraction enabled her to address –and enabled her audiences to envision—possible futures rather than the present or even the past.

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CONCLUSION

Alma Thomas’s Space Series differs quite dramatically from other work produced during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Yet, this investigation challenges scholars’ characterization of the series and Thomas’s work in general as “apolitical.” Indeed, as I have demonstrated, space exploration itself was a political issue at the time. Early in her career,

Thomas had broached nature as an escape from the racial tensions of her moment. But the politicization of nature and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. complicated that project.

Like black science fiction authors, she turned to space in the hopes of finding and perhaps even creating a new utopia—one free from the racial tensions of her moment. By presenting these works in white and black spaces alike, Thomas hoped to open her audiences’ eyes to this possibility, too. Unlike artists associated with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, she did not seek to change the present, so much as envision an alternate future.

In addition to intervening into the scholarship on Alma Thomas, this thesis has sought to uncover a new way to think about the relationship between race and abstraction. In the early nineteenth century, scholars like Alain Locke argued that abstraction was the rightful province of

African-American artists; due to its connections to African motifs and patterns, African

American artists through their African heritage were the true experts of the style. By the second half of the twentieth century, Thomas had gravitated towards it in order to escape this label

(“black artist”). This thesis has attempted to account for Thomas’s professional concerns, but also the ways in which her work was clearly in dialogue with developments in land art, scientific exploration, and the political debates around them. Reading the work in relation to other black art and literature of the era, I have uncovered how Thomas’s approach to abstraction was deeply vested in imagination, experimentation, and other artistic concerns that had everything to do with redefining blackness in the 1960s. It was not an aesthetic or a label, but a practice.

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This interpretation of Thomas’s space series hopefully opens the door to further reconsideration of Thomas’s artwork and her position in art history. With the preceding claims in mind, scholars might more fully revisit the artist’s nature works and also bestow attention on the atmospheric series that the artist created in the last years before her death, which—like the Space

Series—has received little attention. Significantly absent from discussion of the artist is any explanation of why, in this late series, Thomas abandoned her signature “alma stripes,” reverting from broken brushstrokes to washes of color reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s color field work.

Similarly, in light of my claims about Thomas’s Space Series, the work of other seemingly apolitical African American artists might be reconsidered. Artists such as Kenneth Young and

Sam Gilliam should also be read in relation to the work of their peers who created explicitly political and socially charged works. Both artists associated with the ,

Young and Gilliam, African American male artists, created large scale abstract works during this same politically charged time. There is little to no scholarship contextualizing the artists in this way, and their work could significantly impact our understanding of masculinity, gender, and sexuality in . By reading Alma Thomas’s seemingly apolitical paintings in relation to the politics of art and space at the time, the politics of these apolitical works can be recovered.

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lLLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Arts Center at American

University.

Figure 1. Alma Thomas, Air View of a Spring Nursery, 1966

Figure 2. Alma Thomas, Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers, 1968

Figure 3. Claude Monet, Wheatstacks (End of Summer), 1890-91

Figure 4. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-70

Figure 5. Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967

Figure 6. Alma Thomas, March on Washington, 1964

Figure 7. Alma Thomas, Lunar Rendezvous- Circle of Flowers, 1969

Figure 8. Lunar Orbiter Earth image, 1966

Figure 9. Atlas Rocket Blast off, 1962

Figure 10. Mariner 4 Mars image, 1962

Figure 11. Lamar Dodd, The Cosmos Awaits, 1970

Figure 12. Alma Thomas, A Glimpse of Mars, 1969

Figure 13. Stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stargate Sequence, 1968

Figure 14. Stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stargate Sequence, 1968

Figure 15. Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise, 1970

Figure 16. Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859

Figure 17. Barbara Chase- Riboud, Malcolm X, 1969

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