Eliana Willis

A long overdue retrospective for the late artist Alma Thomas has touched down at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
The exhibition, titled “Everything Is Beautiful,” showcases little known aspects of the artist’s life and career, such as her interests in gardening and fashion, and her early student works. It was co-organized with the Columbus Museum in the artist’s hometown of Columbus, Georgia.
“One of the goals of the show has been to have a Columbus-originated story,” Jonathan Frederick Walz, the Columbus Museum’s curator of American art, told Artnet News. “There seems to be this received wisdom that Thomas only became an artist after she stopped teaching in the classroom in 1960, but the material that we had at the museum made us realize that, in fact, she had been making art all along.”
“Her late abstractions kind of end up standing for her entire career,” Walz added. “Our project with this show is to show that Thomas was multifaceted.”
Alma Thomas with students at Howard University Art Gallery (1928 or after). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
Born in 1891, Thomas spent the first nearly 16 years of her life in Columbus before her family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907. After spending several years teaching in Delaware out of high school, she enrolled in Howard University in 1921 and became the first graduate of its art department.
The earliest painting in the show dates to her college years, likely from 1924. By comparing works from throughout her life, “you can really see how she’s exploring different styles and techniques before she arrives at what she focuses on as her signature style,” said Seth Femen, curator of photography at the Chrysler Museum and co-curator the exhibition.
Thomas hit upon that style—the colorful dabs of paint arranged in strips and rows—in the mid-1960s.
Alma Thomas, Blast Off (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
“This is a moment where the New York art world is being highly contested by African Americans and other BIPOC folks and women about the lack of representation in New York museums,” Walz said.
In response, the Whitney began a series of solo shows in a one-room, ground-floor gallery, and Thomas was one of the artists invited to participate.
It was a watershed moment in her career. “It was so important, since Thomas was the first Black woman to be given a solo show at the Whitney and it’s really where her career skyrockets from that point onward,” Walz said.
But like so many women artists, Thomas returned to relative obscurity after her death.
“She and her work just kind of lost currency for quite a long time,” Walz said. “It really wasn’t until 2009, when the Obamas hung the painting Skylight in their private residence apartments in the White House, that suddenly she became a thing again.”
Despite growing interest in Thomas in the last decade, large swaths of her career have received little attention. In the 1930s, she became deeply interested in marionettes, sculpting figures that she brought in as teaching guides to her classroom at D.C.’s Shaw Jr. High School, where she taught from 1925 to 1960.
Alma Thomas, Clown Marionette (ca. 1935). Photo courtesy of the Alma Thomas, Wind Dancing with Spring Flowers (1969). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum.
“Marionettes were a teaching tool that she could use to communicate teaching concepts, but also as the framework of a year-long project where her students learned all different kinds of things—language arts, music, electrical engineering, color theory, history of theater, design,” Walz said. “At the end of the year, the class would produce a version of Alice in Wonderland.”
The only time a Thomas marionette has been exhibited was at the artist’s posthumous 1981 show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Columbus Museum owns five of them, and is also displaying a large architectural drawing for a collapsible marionette stage.
Alma Thomas, Sketch for Giant marionette (1935/1938). Courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
“It is an engineering feat,” Femen said, noting that Thomas had studied draftsmanship at the technical high school she attended. “She’s figuring out how the components will all work together.”
“That engineering and architectural interest really comes through in the late paintings,” Walz added. “They are very considered. They’re somewhat architectonic. Even though they are nature based, there’s a very significant structure behind them.”
Of the more than 150 objects on view in the current presentation, about two dozen have never (or only rarely) been in the public eye.
Alma Thomas, Untitled (1922/1924). Courtesy of the Kinsey Collection, Pacific Palisades, California.
“You can’t do good scholarship on an artist unless you know the range of material,” Walz said. “The same range was being reproduced over and over and people were saying the same things. By broadening the selection, we are hoping to add texture to how people can understand her and her work.”
As Thomas neared the end of her teaching career, she began redoubling her efforts in the studio, and took art classes at American University from 1952 to 1957.
“That’s why, in 1960, she was able to hit the ground running—she didn’t come out of the blue. She was paying her dues all along,” Walz said.
Alma Thomas, Grassy Melodic Chant (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Thomas remained dedicated to her craft until her death, in 1978.
“There are works from 1977 that really show her grappling with physical impairments and adapting to them—you can see it in the work,” Femen said. “She reportedly brought materials with her to the hospital when she went in for the surgery that ultimately was the end of her life.”
See more works from the show below.
Alma Thomas, Untitled (1968). Courtesy Steve and Lesley Testan/Emily Friedman Fine Art.
Alma Thomas, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Alma Thomas, Horizon (1974). Courtesy of Henry H. and Carol Brown Goldberg, Bethesda, Maryland.
Jan van RaayAmerican, Faith Ringgold and Michele Wallace at Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) protest at the Whitney Museum, New York, January 31, 1971. Photo courtesy of Jan van Raay, Portland, Oregon.
Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise (1970). Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
Unidentified youths in theatrical costumes at Howard University (ca. 1927). Photo courtesy of the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.
Alma Thomas, Babbling Brook and Whistling Poplar Tree Symphony (1976). Courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
“Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful” will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, Virginia, July 9–October 3, 2021. It will travel to the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St NW,  Washington, D.C., October 30, 2021–January 23, 2022; the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, February 25–June 5, 2022; and the Columbus Museum, 1251 Wynnton Road, Columbus, Georgia, July 1, 2022–September 25, 2022. 
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Visitors milling around the Great Court at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire last Friday were caught off guard by the sound of a swelling chorus. A troupe of players who, moments before, had seemed like any other tourists there to discover the stately rooms and sprawling grounds of the Baroque countryside estate, broke out into a series of trance-like intonations: “wow, ooh, wow, ooh.”
For the audience invited to see the work of Berlin-based visual artist Tino Sehgal, the troupe’s movements around the courtyard might have evoked the nonsensical dadaist performance art of the interwar years. But I could also relate to the bemused expressions of unsuspecting visitors to the palace, who might more readily have related it to the carefully choreographed flash mobs that were popular marketing ploys in the early 2000s. Either way, it was all a bit weird.
Sehgal is revered in the art world for creating these kinds of scenes, which the 45-year-old artist calls “constructed situations,” designed to stir viewers out of passivity. His artistic practice eschews physical objects, relying on the human responses to these ephemeral live events. Once played out, there is no physical documentation of the work in the form of exhibition catalogues, video recordings, or photographs.
“My basic premise is: Can you make an artwork without making an object? So why would I, on a secondary level, then make a photograph?” Sehgal asked me, as we sat in a shade overlooking one of Blenheim’s manicured gardens.
Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
Even without the wristbands identifying us, you could pretty easily tell the art audience from those who had just stumbled upon the work. Only the latter group (the larger one) reflexively whipped out their cell phones to take pictures. Sehgal has given up trying to control this particular impulse from the public. “I don’t mind it if it is for their private use,” Sehgal told me. “Society has changed. When my work first started, mobile phones literally didn’t even have a camera.”
Sehgal, who is of German and Indian descent, has been exalted by many critics as among the greatest artists of his generation. In 2005, he was the youngest artist ever chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, for which he sent performers dressed as security guards pirouetting around visitors to the pavilion chanting, “Ooh, this is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!” He later won the Golden Lion for work included in the 2013 biennale.
His current exhibition, on view through August 15, was staged by the Blenheim Art Foundation, and blends elements of some of his past works with new scenes designed specifically to respond to the environment of the palace grounds. Sehgal was introduced to Blenheim in the spring because he was looking for a maze to site a project, one of the first initiatives organized as part of veteran gallerist Marian Goodman’s nomadic exhibition program after closing her permanent London space, Marian Goodman Projects. As chance would have it, the art foundation did not have an exhibition scheduled for this summer, and Sehgal was suddenly invited to make a much larger project than he had initially envisioned, unfolding across the vast grounds of the estate.
Tino Sehgal in the grounds at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
Social Distancing and Intimacy
“It was really spontaneous,” Sehgal told me. “But Michael [Frahm, director of Blenheim Art Foundation] was adamant that he wanted to do it now after corona, and it made sense for me after we have been deprived of human interaction for so long.” 
Both Frahm and Sehgal’s main producer, Louise Höjer, were up for the “sports-like challenge” of pulling off the exhibition in just a few months.
“After a long year distanced one from another, Tino’s work feels more relevant than ever: bringing bodies together in space and calling attention to the fleeting, immaterial magic of human connection,” Frahm wrote in his introductory statement.
Höjer traveled to the U.K. ahead of Sehgal and scouted 52 amateur participants from the local area, ranging in age from 16 to 74, to take part. A few of Sehgal’s regular dancers, in-demand contemporary stars from Brussels and Berlin, also traveled to take part. 
Then there was the matter of organizing an exhibition based on human interaction for the age of social distancing. Although it was mostly staged in an outdoor setting, they decided it would be best for the players approaching visitors to don masks and keep their distance, as a sign of respect and to help people feel safe.
Tino Sehgal in the Rose Garden at Blenheim. Photo by Edd Horder. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
The roving troupe of dancers intermittently swarmed around the visitors to the art foundation, shepherding us throughout the grounds to where other works materialized. Outside, in the secret garden, a young girl serenaded passersby, an iteration of Sehgal’s 2006 work, This You. Inside the grandiose Great Hall, amid classical statuary including Venus and Bacchus, an intertwined couple writhed on the floor for Sehgal’s Kiss (2002), re-enacting kiss scenes from famous works of art throughout history, from Auguste Rodin’s embracing nudes to Jeff Koons and Iona Staller’s more provocative poses.
A more recent work, This Joy, conceived last year for the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, occurred next to a small fountain. Players sang out a bizarrely electric scat version of Beethoven’s Für Elise, which built to a crescendo that was theatrically synchronized with a burst of water springing from the fountain.
The most affecting parts of the exhibition were the works specifically designed to respond to the palace grounds. Across the vast lawn in front of the palace, on the majestic water terraces, and nestled in the rose garden, players almost blended into the landscape. If you weren’t paying attention, your eye might have glossed over them as picnickers on the lawn or even perhaps more delicate shrubbery designed by Capability Brown. If you got close enough to one of the players, they might approach you and share details about their lives.
This story-telling component of the new work, titled This Element, borrows from Sehgal’s These Associations, a work first shown at Tate Modern in 2012. The stories shared by the participants are answers to a number of prompts from the artist, such as: When have you felt a sense of arrival? What is something you are dissatisfied with in yourself? What are the personality traits of somebody you admire? But the artist does not control what intimacies they share beyond this.
When I summoned up the courage to open myself up, and gave permission with my eyes for someone to approach me, it was a local bus driver, who told me about a regular passenger of his, an elderly gentleman who battles his own physical decline to ride the bus to go and visit his niece every Thursday. The story was not particularly emotional, but after a year and a half of being starved of interaction with friends, let alone strangers, I was in a very raw emotional state. I was embarrassed when tears welled up in my eyes.
Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation.
The Lesson of Beach Volleyball 
Sehgal’s art tends to trigger this kind of reaction. And despite his forbearance of objects, he does actually sell his work—which he does through oral agreements with no paper trail. The rights to stage his situations have sold for six figure sums to museums including the Hirshhorn, MoMA, and the Guggenheim, as well as many private collections.
“There is not a huge [market] but when people are interested, the fact that we do it with an oral contract is not really an issue,” he said. “If anything, it is maybe something that they find attractive.” If buyers want to show it, they need to give a six-months heads up, and trusted associates of the artist will be dispatched to set it up.
I asked him what he thinks about the possible legacy of his work given that it is so ephemeral. What happens when he’s gone, and the chain of knowledge dilutes the work further and further from its original iteration? But Sehgal is not worried about obsolescence. He intentionally structures his situations like a game, with basic rules of play, and the interruption of chance encounters means that no two situations are exactly alike anyway. He could get deep into the theory behind this, but he offers a helpful sports analogy.
“Nobody is worried that beach volleyball would cease to exist because you have got the rules,” he shrugged. “People can play it better or worse, but it is still beach volleyball.”
Besides, material objects face obsolescence too. Paintings can burn up in a fire, or be eaten by pests, or deteriorate through age. “Somebody attacked a Barnett Newman at the Stedelijk Museum once—that can happen,” Sehgal pointed out. “I think everything on this planet is, in that sense, endangered and can deteriorate. And with art objects we make a big effort to ensure that they don’t… . So I think it is just a question of effort, finances, will, [and] planning decisions.”
He recalled a particularly important exchange he had with a conservator during his early days in the art world, who pointed out that most of the objects that populate museums would not exist today without careful conservation and restoration efforts. “We don’t really conserve paintings, we produce them,” the conservator said. “When a painting has been restored three times, is it the same painting?”
In that sense, Sehgal’s object-less work doesn’t seem any less ephemeral. He invited me to look further back into the past. “We have the tendency to think that objects are what remain or persist, but if you go back to antiquity, it is Plato,” he said, and “ideas that continue to exist.”
Tino Sehgal is on view at Blenheim Art Foundation through August 15.
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As the Manchester International Arts Festival continues into its final weeks, we decided to take a look at some of the best contemporary art interventions happening around the city.
From an installation by Forensic Architecture on the occasion of the group’s 10th anniversary, to the transformation of a Jewish synagogue into a meditation on community and history, here are five must-see works.

The most Instagrammable artwork on display is Big Ben Lying Down with Political Books, an installation by Argentine artist Marta Minujín. The work is a 140-foot replica of London’s famous clock, seemingly fallen to the grounds of Piccadilly Gardens. The work is another in a series of book-covered monuments the artist has installed at art events over the decades. This one contains 20,000 copies of “books that have shaped British politics” in an effort to spark conversations about the state today, as Britain reckons with new coronavirus strains and the repercussions of Brexit.

Claire Govender adds the 20,000th book to “Ben Ben Lying Down with Political Books” by Marta Minujin, Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

Cephas Williams, Portrait of Black Britain (2021)
Yandass Ndlovu, a participant of “Portrait of Black Britain” at the installation. Photo Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.
“Portrait of Black Britain is me taking control of my narrative, asking other Black people to join me in the reintroduction of our presence and stories in the 21st century,” Cephas Williams wrote of his Manchester art installation.
In this massive undertaking, Williams has embarked on a mission to create the largest photographic trove of Black British people ever created. For the project, Williams asked ordinary individuals to share their stories, successful or not, and then presented the 116 portraits he took.
Cephas Williams’s installation “Portrait of Black Britain” part of Manchester International Arts Festival. Photo: Fabio De Paola/PA Wire.

Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.
Turner Prize-winner Laure Prouvost has transformed the Ladies Gallery in the newly renovated 1874 synagogue that houses the Manchester Jewish Museum into a time machine. The installation features textiles and a film that pays homage to the Jewish women who helped build Manchester into a modern city, and found comfort and safety within the walls of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Prouvost worked with contemporary members of the Women’s Textile Group to create objects within the installation that reference themes of migration, community, femininity, and religion.
Laure Prouvost, The long waited, weighted, gathering (2021). Photo: Michael Pollard.

Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing)
Still from Forensic Architecture Cloud Studies (2012–ongoing), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
Ten years ago, when the art and activist group Forensic Architecture was just forming, no one could predict the impact it would have on the art world. In an exhibition commemorating the group’s decade-long practice, a group of works from a variety of its past investigations come together in a wrenching exploration of how the air we breathe is co-opted to “suppress civilian protest, maintain and defend violent border regimes, and empower extractive industry.” The exhibition also features the first phase in Forensic Architecture’s new work exploring environmental racism in Louisiana, where an area deemed “Cancer Alley” has wreaked havoc on generations of Black residents.
Forensic Architecture with Forensic Oceanography, The Seizure of the luventa (2017), courtesy Forensic Architecture.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2008-21). Photo: Michael Pollard.
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