Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body

"With the artworks brought together in Barbara Earl Thomas: The Illuminated Body, the artist focuses on the body in order to convey how light and shadow trigger a visual experience and to explore how we communicate who we are as well as our intentions toone another. In one sense, this exploration is highly personal: "As a Black person, I can't help but see myself in the landscape and imagine how others might experience me based on how I appear to them. I search myself to see how I react to and employ mythoughts and opinions because, aside from being Black, I'm also human and subject to the world's influences." In another sense, Thomas's latest works seek to express not just the physical but also the metaphysical and metaphorical, the profound and intangible: what is within, what is beyond the sight of our eyes"--
A talented visual storyteller, Barbara Earl Thomas has drawn from history, literature, folklore, mythology, and biblical stories over her forty-year career to reflect the social fabric of our times. Thomas’s figural and narrative imagery has a deeply philosophical and emotional force, and light and dark have been especially potent concepts in her work. This book of new works meditates on the visual experience of the body within a physical and metaphorical world of light and shadow. Based on real people, the portraits "elevate to the magnificent" her family, friends, and neighbors, as well as cultural icons of the African American literary landscape. Thomas's illumination of the human figure through her light-filled artworks and portraiture encourages the viewer to reflect on how we communicate ourselves to the world and how we perceive those among us.Exhibition dates: Chrysler Museum of Art: February 24–August 20, 2023; Wichita Art Museum: October 7, 2023–January 14, 2024; Arthur Ross Gallery, the University of Pennsylvania: February 17–May 21, 2024