“What is more far-reaching than beauty?”
In 1924, a young woman named Alma Thomas posed that question in her college yearbook. Thomas was the first graduate of Howard University’s newly formed department of art. Her groundbreaking abstract paintings were decades away—after graduating she would first devote 35 years to teaching art at a junior high school in Washington, DC.
But Thomas, like many of her fellow Washingtonians, already saw the power of Black artists pursuing beauty. At a time of Jim Crow segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social unrest, their choice to focus on art for art’s sake was radical.
Historian and professor Jeffrey C. Stewart has called them “aesthetic warriors.” They believed art could transform their place in American society.
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