Barbara Earl Thomas

Witnessing the World with Wonder

Written by Anne Liu Kellor; Photographed by Alyssa Teuton

Barbara Earl Thomas is an artist, a maker, a writer, and a thinker. In her nearly forty years of making art across many mediums, her work shines light upon the sublime that exists within the ordinary, and the confluences of history and mythology that exist within us all. Thomas likens herself to a crow who scavenges, closely observing the world around her and picking up the shiny pieces. Her work often creates mini-biographies of her subjects that say, “This is how I see you. You are bigger and better and shinier than you even know.”

In her 2021 solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, Geography of Innocence, Thomas worked primarily with cut paper and Tyvek. Using photographs of children she knew for inspiration, she created portraits cut with a utility knife from heavy black paper—images that invoke the broad, elegant strokes one might find in printmaking. Then, Thomas blended warm reds, oranges, and yellows, with occasional accents of turquoise and Kelly green, beneath the cut-outs, so that color becomes the defining negative space and her figures become illuminated, transcendent, glowing from within.

Thomas’ aim was, in part, to explore the way that Black children are so often seen as less innocent than their peers. In a world with so much life lost too young to racial and gun violence, she wanted to focus on the living—to evoke the vulnerability and joy inherent in young people’s beings: a boy proudly holding his first library card and satchel of books; a girl in a magnificent dress embracing her cat; two young boys with their arms around each other, smiling with delight.

In some pieces, elaborate borders weave in words and images from nature—flowers, vines, a hummingbird, a dragonfly, a snake—evoking a larger story and lineage that surrounds and informs each person. The boy featured in her piece “Color Wheel” is surrounded by book titles—Black Boy, Notes of a Native Son, and Between the World and Me—as well as a ruler and an artist’s color wheel which includes the text, “adding black” and “adding white.” The boy looks openly at the viewer, his hand on top of his heart, his open, direct gaze radiating trust at the viewer.

Barbara Earl Thomas was born in Seattle to a family of Southern storytellers, sharecroppers, and fisherman. The first in her family to be born outside of the South and to go to college, Thomas studied with renowned Seattle painters, Jacob Lawrence and Michael Spafford, at the University of Washington, where she received her Master of Arts in 1977. She began her art career as a painter, working primarily with egg tempera paint. She then went on to explore printmaking and papercutting, appreciating the aesthetic challenge and elegance of working within the restraints of precise strokes and lines. Eventually she learned how to adapt her work into glass, creating cylindrical “story vessels,” blown glass vases sandblasted with imagery similar to her papercuts, with light shining through the negative spaces. Then she came full circle, bringing the feeling of glass and light to her 2-D papercut compositions. Thomas was also commissioned to produce several large-scale installations, such as a laser-cut steel panels at Portland’s Multnomah County Courthouse, and glass windscreen along a train platform in Seattle’s Judkins Park, as well as a series of stained-glass windows at Yale University—work which continues to grow her relationship to both local and far-reaching communities.

Thomas has also had a long career in the public arts: working for organizations such as the Elliott Bay Book Company; overseeing programs for Seattle’s Department of Arts and Cultural Affairs; serving as director for the Bumbershoot Festival Commission, the Northwest’s largest arts festival; and eventually working as executive director for The Northwest African American Museum of Art, until she stepped down in 2013. But despite these demanding roles, Thomas has always first and foremost been an artist, working for years in her home studio from five until late into the night after her day job, drawing inspiration from her rich Black lineage, and the broad influences she felt growing up on the Pacific Rim.

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No matter her medium, Thomas seeks to create a sense of visual magic for her audience. For Geography of Innocence, she created large 3-D hanging illuminated structures out of white, hand-cut Tyvek, inviting viewers to experience the feeling of not just viewing, but being inside the light that glowed within her 2-D work. Thomas says she likes to create “these incredibly detailed immersive environments because they require a physicality from me and also from the viewer. So once you step across the threshold…there’s a certain kind of surrender that is required or that happens.” She wants to disarm viewers from their preconceived notions. They might, for example, see iconography that reminds them of religious symbolism, yet upon closer examination they may realize it is not tied to any one culture or set of beliefs. “I want people to disengage from their knowing and just enter into the mystery,” she says. In other words, she wants people to be fully present to their senses, participating in the unexpected relationship that arises between artist and viewer.

Thomas also considers herself to be a problem-solver. When she has a new idea or assignment, she tries to figure out what the work needs for it to best reach her audience. She takes into consideration her own skill sets, what tools she has access to, and who she can ask for help—whether a glassblower, a metalworker, or a team of people of all ages and backgrounds who’ve come to her Columbia City studio in Seattle to help her cut small shapes out of sprawling yards of Tyvek. Through collaboration, she has learned to become more of a director of her work, to enter a “shared feeling of being one body” and to be willing to give away a bit of her “self-ness” in the process.

At heart, Thomas’s work is driven by a deep, abiding curiosity. “I make work because I want to see what my thoughts are about,” she says, “and if [they’ll] unfold to tell me something that I’ll be surprised and newly informed by what they find.” She is willing to reexamine what she thinks she believes, and as such continues to reach for new thresholds. Thomas, raised in religious households, considers herself “a religion agnostic,” that is, “one who embraces the great unknowing without a formal structure, but understands that poetry, light, music and ritual elements, when combined, can be powerful and evocative.” At the core of her art-making philosophy Thomas is asking, “How do you manage the great unknowing every day?” This simple yet profound question informs how she listens to what her work has to reveal—what medium does this idea want to be expressed through, what built-in constraints exist to guide these choices, and what tools can help make it so? Aware of her own power and privilege as an artist and thinker, she does not take for granted this gift that humans have to ponder and think critically. After all, she asks, “what else separates us from our house pets?”

In turn, Thomas’s work asks viewers to examine the inherited perspectives we’ve been handed, and to be willing to see ourselves anew: to disengage with what we think we know; to enter together into the mystery before us and inside of us; and to open our eyes to the everyday wonder of being alive.

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Witnessing the World with Wonder

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