Deborah Thomas
Deborah Thomas is a fine artist and teacher living in Los Angeles who has studied and taught art history, literature and American culture and worked as an independent curator in addition to exhibiting her own work as a fine artist. After earning a BA with Honors and Distinction at the University of Michigan and an MA and ABD at the University of Pennsylvania in American Civilization, she went on to study the Méthode Martenot, an alternative fine arts method, in Geneva, Switzerland and non-representational painting with Richard Pousette-Dart in New York. She has taught at the Universities of Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and at Vassar College. Currently she teaches art history, contemporary art and critical theory at Pasadena City College, Glendale College and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Switzerland.
Recently Deborah has been creating conceptual installations and mixed media works and organizing site-specific curatorial projects in and around Southern California. She especially enjoys working with themes relating to local landscape and the environment or family and the remembered past. Early on in her career she published an article on 18th-century immigrant landscapist George Beck and has continued to explore topics in landscape theory as well as contemporary activist discussions relating to art and ecology. She currently serves on the boards of the Arroyo Arts Collective and the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art; she is active in SCWCA’s Eco-art Collective and was recently named a chair of WCA’s national Eco-art Caucus; she also served as panel organizer and moderator for WCA’s eco-art conference Elements in Berkeley.
As a curator, Deborah has recently been exploring artistic and environmental concerns rooted in an appreciation for the local and the site-specific. She has organized a number of exhibitions in non-profit spaces with innovative conceptual premises including ‘Intimate Geography: Getting to know a place;’ ‘Estate of Mind;’ ‘Bringing the Past to Light: New Art from Old Images’ at El Alisal, the historic home of Charles Lummis; at Avenue 50 Studio, ‘Day of the Dead Planet,’ which uniquely engaged community activist traditions associated with DÃa de los Muertos in behalf of environmental awareness; and ‘Wilderness Mind: Dissolving Duality,’ for SCWCA as part of Angel’s Gate Cultural Center’s year-long exhibition program, ‘Into the Wilderness: The Journey Within.’