About this Event
Please join the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, and Social Justice Scholars Program for a private lunch conversation with artist Lava Thomas.
Students will have the opportunity to speak with Lava Thomas about her artistic practice, career path, and her exhibition, Lava Thomas: Homecoming. Please visit the exhibition at the Spelman Museum prior to the event and come prepared with questions.
*Lunch will be provided.
About the exhibition:
Through her immersive drawing installations and painstaking attention to detail, Lava Thomas creates opportunities to celebrate the beauty of African American life. Lava Thomas: Homecoming brings three bodies of her work together for the first time, Looking Back and Seeing Now (2015–2021), Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (2018–), and Decatur (2022). These works demonstrate Thomas’s dedication to exploring personal and cultural narratives of survival and bravery against the odds. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, Professor and Chancellor's Fellow, Department of African American Studies and Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine.
About Lava Thomas:
Lava Thomas was born in Los Angeles, CA. She studied at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and received a BFA from California College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award and a 2019-2021 Lucas Artists Fellowship Award at Montalvo Arts Center. Thomas has participated in artist residencies at Facebook Los Angeles (2020), Headlands Center for the Arts (2018) and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. In 2015 she received the Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors. Her work is included in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial exhibition, The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. It has been exhibited in various institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the International Print Center, New York, NY; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. It is held in the permanent collections of the United States Consulate General in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; the M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA. Thomas's work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, KQED Arts, The Art Newspaper, and LA Weekly.
Exhibition Tour with Lava Thomas:
Following the Art & Social Justice Lunch, students are welcome to join artist Lava Thomas at 2pm for an exhibition tour at the Spelman Museum.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Spelman College, 350 Spelman Lane SW, Atlanta, United States