Primary: After and With Alma Thomas -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Bettina Judd

This is a free, in-person only event and registration is encouraged. This event takes place in the Winter Theater at Agnes Scott College(141 E. College St Decatur, GA 30030). Doors open at 7:00pm. Event begins promptly at 7:30pm.This event is open to the general public and the Agnes Scott College community.

Charis and the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and Creative Art Departments of Agnes Scott College present an evening with Alexis Pauline Gumbs in conversation with Bettina Judd in celebration of . This book is an exploration of sisterhood, creativity, and community inspired by the artist Alma Thomas’s life and work, from the award-winning poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was an influential figure in twentieth-century modern art, best known for her bright, mosaiclike abstract paintings. Although some critics have seen Thomas’s emphasis on beauty, color, and abstract art as a way to divorce her work from her life as a Black woman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reveals how Thomas’s art was, in fact, deeply rooted in the Black community in which she lived. Black, in other words, was one of Thomas’s primary colors.
Gumbs sheds light on Thomas’s experience as a junior high school teacher in the still-segregated schools of Washington, D.C., where Thomas—as educator, mentor, and advocate—established community art programs for Black schoolchildren and galleries to showcase Black artists’ work. In this volume of poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, allowing the wonder in Thomas’s work to open her to wonder about her own creativity, sistering, daughtering, and practice of communal transformation.

About the author

Alexis Pauline Gumbs grew up in the Charis High School Feminist Writers Circle and is cherished by a broad community of readers for her poetic devotion to Black feminist possibility. Her most recent book, was named a best book of the year by TIME, Publisher's Weekly and the New York Public Library, won the Zora Award and the Judy Grahn Prize in nonfiction and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and Brooklyn Public Library Book Award. Alexis lives in Durham, North Carolina in a constant ceremony of Black feminist transformation with her partner and collaborator Sangodare and their beloved community.

About the conversation partner

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of African American Studies at Emory University.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.

About the venue: The Winter Theater is located within the Dana Fine Arts Center on Agnes Scott College's campus. The space is wheelchair accessible. Masks are encouraged but not required. Free parking is available to the public in the parking deck on S. McDonough St and Buttrick Dr.
If you have any questions or to request specific accessibility accommodations including ASL interpretation, please contact [email protected] or call the store at 404-524-0304.

About Our Partners

The Agnes Scott Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department invites students to explore gender and its intersections with sexuality, race and ethnicity, nationality, disability, and class. Women and gender are analyzed from the perspective of the humanities, fine arts, social and natural sciences.

The Agnes Scott Department of Creative Arts guides visual artists, musicians, dancers, writers, actors and other creatives within a liberal arts tradition to define and contextualize their individual pursuits in response to our times' intellectual and social challenges. This program prepares students for creative expression in various settings.

The Literature, Media, and Writing Department at Spelman College offers comprehensive training in English-language literary, visual, and rhetorical traditions with a special emphasis on Black women’s contributions to global histories of cultural expression.

The James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University supports scholarship and public engagement that examines race and intersecting dimensions of human difference including but not limited to class, gender, religion, and sexuality.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.
By attending our event, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email [email protected].