Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, portraiture, sculpture, printmaking, public art
Website: lavathomas.com
Lava Thomas was born in 1958 in Los Angeles, California. She studied at UCLA’s School of Art Practice, then received a BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which later awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. She has lived and worked in San Francisco for decades. She is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, SFMOMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University.
In 2024 the San Francisco Arts Commission unveiled her Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman: A Monument to Honor Dr. Maya Angelou at the San Francisco Main Library — a commission with a history as significant as the monument itself. Thomas was first selected in 2015, but the city reversed course; after the reversal generated national attention and a public apology from the city acknowledging harm to a Black woman artist, Thomas was reinstated in 2019. Her awards include the 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, the 2020 Artadia Award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2015), and a KALA Art Institute Master Artist Award.
Thomas works primarily in drawing — graphite, charcoal, Conté pencil, and watercolor on large-scale paper — producing monumental portraits of historical figures, civil rights activists, and individuals whose lives have been shaped by racial violence, erasure, or resistance. Her drawings are finished works of extraordinary technical devotion and psychological force; the Jessica Silverman gallery describes them as combining the startling impact of Richard Long’s “Men in Cities” with the quiet dignity of Hans Holbein’s royal portraits. A recurring series, Looking Back and Seeing Now, uses historical mug shots of women arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott as the basis for life-size portraits that restore their individuality and dignity. Her practice extends into printmaking, tambourine sculpture, and monumental public art.
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