Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas

A vibrant exhibition celebrating Alma Thomas’s singular artistic vision and her lifelong pursuit of beauty through art, nature, music, and the cosmos. On tour from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Composing Color invited visitors to see the world through Thomas’s eyes and explore how she transformed her experiences of color, light, nature, music, and space into exuberant abstract compositions. At Newfields, the exhibition was adapted to create a more immersive, experiential, and community-centered experience, extending Thomas’s ideas beyond the gallery through hands-on engagement, sensory experiences, and connections across the museum and gardens.

My Role

I led the content, interpretive, and experience-development strategy for adapting the traveling exhibition to meet Newfields’ educational, community engagement, and experiential goals. I led the development of the interpretive framework and self-guided experience, using the exhibition’s themes of nature, music, space, and beauty to create connections across the galleries and gardens. I developed community partnerships, including a collaboration with a local glass artist for a hands-on mosaic activity that invited visitors to explore color, pattern, and light. I also guided the creation of a gallery soundtrack featuring music connected to Alma Thomas, extending the experience through the exhibition website and Spotify. I led targeted summative evaluation to better understand how visitors engaged with the section didactics and used those findings to inform improvements to interpretive content and design.