Lectures and Talks

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

Dylan McLaughlin (Diné) is a sound and video artist, storyteller, and educator from the Navajo Nation. In experimental music, improvisational performances, and multi-media installations, McLaughlin critically examines the impact of extractive systems on threatened ecosystems. Weaving Diné mythology, ecological data, and environmental histories, he engages in the poetics and politics of human relations to land.

McLaughlin's work has been presented at Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado; RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver; SITE Santa Fe; and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York. He is the 2024 Native Arts Artist-in-Residence at the Denver Art Museum. McLaughlin lives and works in Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn.