Art Book Club: Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful hosted by Tara Tieso

VIRTUAL EVENT

Psst…. we’ve started an art book club at Wet Paint.

Wish you read more about art? Interested in talking about Creativity? Artists? Art movements? The artistic process? Art concepts?

Read the selection and come discuss. Haven’t read the book? Come anyway and discover!

Facilitated by your most excellent host, Tara Tieso; teaching artist and active member of the Twin Cities arts community

This month’s selection: Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful

A sweeping retrospective of Alma W. Thomas’s wide-reaching artistic practice that sheds new light on her singular search for beauty

Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas’s life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the years of commercial and critical success, and describes how her innovative palette and loose application of paint grew out of a long study of color theory. Essays trace Thomas’s journey from semirural Georgia to international recognition and situate her work within the context of the Washington Color School and creative communities connected to Howard University. Featuring rarely seen theatrical designs, sculpture, family photographs, watercolors, and marionettes, this volume demonstrates how Thomas’s pursuit of beauty extended to every facet of her life—from her exuberant abstractions to the conscientious construction of her own persona through community service, teaching, and gardening.  

Published in association with The Columbus Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art

About the artist:

Tara L Tieso is an abstract artist who lives and paints in the historic arts Lowertown neighborhood of Saint Paul, on the mighty Mississippi. She works in encaustic, an ancient beeswax and resin medium fused to its substrate with a torch. Tara also works in pen and ink, and loves water soluble colors of any type.

Tara is Past Board President of nationally celebrated WARM, Women’s Art Resources Minnesota – where she worked with other women in the arts to steward the rich 40-year feminist legacy of Minnesota’s brilliant women artists. She currently serves on the Board of The Show Non-Profit, which brings artists of all abilities together in creative community.  

As teaching artist, Tara facilitates Eagan Artist Connect, Wet Paint’s Book Club, and Creative Circles from her loft studio. 

A grateful recipient of the McKnight Foundation-funded Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Grant, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant; she is one of 30 ArtSage Minnesota Artists, and a winner of North Hennepin Community College Award of Excellence in Memory of Lance Kiland from the Minnesota State Fair Foundation. Her work hangs in private collections in the Twin Cities, greater Minnesota, and Philadelphia.