Teaching Packet

Art Tales: Alma Thomas

Part of Art Tales for Pre-K

Alma Thomas loved to explore color—which she did as an artist and art teacher, teaching in Washington, DC, public schools for over thirty-five years. Many of her paintings include only one color or a few colors. Her paintings show her love of nature and music.

This nearly square, abstract painting is filled with circles within circles, like nested rings, each of a single bright color against the ivory white of the canvas. Each ring is made up of a series of short, rectangular dashes, and some bands are narrower while others are a bit wider. The majority of the rings are crimson and brick red, and they are interspersed with bands of lapis blue, army green, and pale pink. One of two pumpkin-orange bands is the smallest, innermost ring at the center. There is one aqua-blue colored ring just inside a pale, shell-white ring, which is the first to get cropped by the edges of the canvas. A few red, green, and blue rings beyond the white band are only seen at the corners of the canvas.
Alma Thomas, Pansies in Washington, 1969, acrylic on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Vincent Melzac), 2015.19.144

Grade Level

Subject

Language

Look

What colors stand out to you?

What shape do you see repeated in this painting? Can you count the number of times it appears?

Step back and look at the painting from far away. Does it look like anything to you? Step forward and take a look at the painting when you’re very close to it. What does it look like now?

Imagine you could step inside the painting. What would it feel like?

What one word would you use to describe the painting? What do you see that makes you say that?

Read

Planting a Rainbow (Spanish language version: Cómo plantar un arco iris)
by Lois Ehlert

A mother and child plant a rainbow of flowers every year and wait for the rainbow to grow.

Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History
by Vashti Harrison

This book offers short biographies of black women in history, including Alma Thomas.

Make: Create a Color Square

You Will Need

  • Paint sticks
  • Heavyweight paper cut into 8 × 8 inch squares

Choose one color from your paint sticks. Use it to make different shapes and lines within your paper square. Use just one color, like Alma Thomas, to make small blocks of color that build a larger painting. Try experimenting—turn the square or hold the paint stick differently—to create new marks and patterns! With a friend or a group, try combining your color squares in different ways to make one larger, multicolored square.

Vocab Bank

  • bold
  • experiment

Download

Art Tales: Coloring and Cut-Outs booklet (PDF, 3.5 MB)

Art Tales for Pre-K (PDF, 7.2 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte (PDF, 7.5 MB)

Primeros Pasos En El Arte: Colorear y Recortes (PDF, 3.7 MB)

Visit

Register for the Art Tales pre-K school tour

Submit Student Work

Send images of your students' projects that follow these activities - email [email protected]

You may also like

The curling, flaring petal of a jack-in-the-pulpit blossom wrapping around a vertical, elongated core nearly fills this vertical painting. The flower rises from a narrow base and is veined with white against dark, maroon red. It unfurls to reveal the deep maroon stamen within. Spring-green leaves span the lower edge of the composition, beneath the flower, and billow around the blossom, across the top of the painting. A soft blue and white background recalls clouds in a bright sky.

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Georgia O'Keeffe

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Georgia O'Keeffe’s painting Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3. Students learn how to look at this painting, what you can read to learn more, how to draw a flower close up, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

Made with mostly square or rectangular pieces of patterned paper in shades of asparagus and moss green, sky blue, tan, and ash brown, a man with brown skin sits in the center of this horizontal composition with a second person over his shoulder, in the upper left corner of this collage. The man’s facial features are a composite of cut-outs, mostly in shades of brown and gray, as if from black-and white photographs, and he smokes a cigarette. He sits with his body angled slightly to our right and he looks off in that direction, elbows resting on thighs and wrists crossed. His button-down shirt and pants, similarly collaged, are mottled with sky blue and white. One foot, on our right, is created with a cartoonish, shoe-shaped, black silhouette. The paper used for the other foot seems to have been scraped and scratched, creating the impression that that foot is bare. A tub, made of the same blue and white paper of the man’s suit, sits on the ground to our left, in the lower corner. The man sits in front of an expanse made up of green and brown pieces of paper patterned with wood grain, which could be a cabin. In a window in the upper left, a woman’s face, her features similarly collaged, looks out at us. One dark hand, large in relation to the people, rests on the sill with the fingers extended down the side of the house. The right third of the composition is filled collaged scraps of paper patterned to resemble leafy trees. Closer inspection reveals the form of a woman, smaller in scale than the other two, standing in that zone, facing our left in profile near a gray picket fence. She has a brown face, her hair wrapped in a patterned covering, and she holds a watermelon-sized, yellow fruit with brown stripes. Several blue birds and a red-winged blackbird fly and stand nearby. Above the woman and near the top of the composition, a train puffs along the top of what we read as the tops of trees. The artist signed the work in black letters in the upper right corner: “romare bearden.”

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Romare Bearden

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Romare Bearden’s collage Tomorrow I May Be Far Away. Students learn how to look at this collage, what you can read to learn more, how to create a collage, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.

Educational Resource:  Art Starters: Joseph Cornell

A lesson for preschool to kindergarten students about artist Joseph Cornell’s artwork Untitled (Medici Prince). Students learn how to look at this artwork, what you can read to learn more, how to build your own story box, and a list of vocabulary terms related to this activity.