Howard Wilber Thomas

THE GALLERY SEEKS EARLY (1930s-1940s) ARTWORK AND PHOTO OF HOWARD WILBER THOMAS: info@GalleryofWisconsinArt.com

BORN: 1899 in Mount Pleasant, Ohio
DIED: 1971 in North Carolina

Howard Wilber Thomas was a painter, printmaker, and educator. 

He began studying art in 1919 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  In 1930, after several years of teaching high school, he taught at Milwaukee State Teachers College.  He also directed the Milwaukee Handicraft Program sponsored by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

While at the Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), he became good friends with Carl Holty, Edward Boerner, Robert von Neumann and Gustave Moeller. 

Thomas was a painter of the American scene from the beginning of his career to the mid 1940s.  He explored cubism during the mid-to-late 1930s. Thomas made a trip to the South for a speaking engagement in 1941 and the red earth around Asheville, North Carolina interested him.

After 1942, Thomas worked permanently in the South. He was an enthusiastic teacher at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (1942-43), Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia (1943-45) and the University of Georgia where he arranged for Carl Holty, an authority on modern painting, to become artist-in-residence. The “transformation” in Thomas’ painting was the result of interaction with Holty. His progression from regionalist imagery of the 1930s to abstract imagery of the 1950s was done with great deliberation. 

Although Thomas painted in the South after 1942, his Milwaukee association shaped the most important concepts of his intellectual and artistic maturation, especially his exceptional visual memory. 

Thomas was a member of the Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors Association, and exhibited extensively throughout his career. He earned many honors and prizes, including invitations to exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1950 and the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum in 1958.