Beyond: A Solo Exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
Curated by Lizetta LeFalle-Collins, Beyond was the inaugural exhibition at the newly remodeled Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in 2015. In works spanning various media, Thomas’s connections to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother became a means to investigate the liminal space between life and death, mind and body, the personal and the political. Works in Beyond drew from a range of secular and religious traditions and utilized an array of non-traditional approaches to portraiture in a consideration of the corporeal limitations of existence.
In her curatorial statement LeFalle Collins writes:
Thomas draws our attention to a wide range of approaches to the body, making reference to Victorian funerary practices, the anatomical certainties of the modern-day operating table, and an emphasis on hair as a powerful signifier of identity. The artist’s recent series of digitally generated portraits of clouds suggests both the “light at the end of the tunnel” and a vision of 21st century existence within a floating “cloud” of data. Ultimately, Thomas uses our breadth of collective and individual physical experience as a point of departure from which to consider not only the world as we know it, but that which might lie beyond.
