Death of Thelma Johnson Streat in Los Angeles

On 21 May 1959, Thelma Johnson Streat died suddenly of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, at the age of forty‑six or forty‑seven, depending on the birth year cited.[1][3][13] Her death ended a prolific but relatively short career that had spanned painting, mural work, textile design, modern dance, children’s education, and intercultural activism.

At the time of her death, Streat and her second husband, playwright and producer John Edgar Kline, had been engaged in educational projects, including Children’s City initiatives in Canada and Hawaii, aimed at teaching young people about world cultures through art and performance.[2][7][13] She had already achieved historic milestones, such as becoming the first Black woman artist collected by MoMA and the first American woman with a television program in Paris.[1][5][7][16]

Streat’s passing in Los Angeles is historically significant because it marked the eclipse of a figure whose fame had peaked in the 1940s and early 1950s but then slipped from mainstream art historical narratives.[9][15] For decades, her contributions were largely absent from standard accounts of American modernism and African American art, even as her works remained in major collections.

Renewed interest since the late twentieth and early twenty‑first centuries—reflected in scholarship, exhibitions, and acquisitions such as the Smithsonian’s purchase of her mural study "Medicine and Transportation"—has reframed 1959 not simply as an end point but as a pivot in a longer story of recovery and recognition.[8][11][14][15] Her date of death now serves as a reference for historians tracing the arc of her influence and the subsequent rediscovery of her legacy in Black women’s art history.