Alma Thomas died on February 24, 1978, in Washington, D.C., at the age of 86.
Alma Woodsey Thomas died on February 24, 1978, in Washington, D.C., following complications from surgery. She was 86 years old and had continued painting almost until the end of her life, despite worsening arthritis that had forced her to adapt her technique in her final years, including switching to acrylics for their ease of use and working from a wheelchair.
At the time of her death, Thomas had achieved a level of recognition rare for any artist of her generation, and unprecedented for an African American woman: solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and works acquired by major institutions including the White House, where First Lady Michelchelle Obama and Barack Obama would later hang her painting Resurrection in the family quarters, making her the first African American woman artist represented in the White House's permanent collection.
Her death marked the end of a life that spanned from the Jim Crow South of the 1890s to the height of the Civil Rights and feminist art movements of the 1970s. Thomas's legacy continued to grow posthumously, with major retrospectives, scholarly reappraisal of her contributions to Color Field and abstract painting, and her enduring influence on generations of artists who followed her example of persistence, joy, and formal innovation late into life.