An arts administrator and dedicated educator of high school and college students, Helen Anne Wall Thomas has been called “a North Carolina artist with a Bauhaus heart.” A dedicated modernist artist, Thomas created boldly colorful geometric compositions in her paintings and serigraphs.
Two places are given for her birthplace: Wadesboro, North Carolina, in her obituary, while other sources list nearby Lilesville, where she attended high school. Both are located in Anson County, southeast of Charlotte. Thomas earned two degrees—a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts—from Women’s College of the University of North Carolina (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro.) She was the first to receive a master’s degree in a program started by Gregory Ivy, who was the mentor not only of Thomas, but also Maud Gatewood, Lee Hall, and MacDonald Bane. Ivy was known for his progressive attitudes toward art and art education and was responsible for bringing significant New York artists such as Franz Kline and Philip Guston to campus. Ivy also had ties to Black Mountain College where many instructors had been associated with the Bauhaus.
Over the years, Thomas did postgraduate work at the University of Hawaii, the University of Georgia, Athens, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and New York University. She embarked on her teaching career in public schools in Oxford, North Carolina, then moved to Central High School in Charlotte. There, she received a Ford Foundation grant for high school instructors, allowing her to study for a year on the west coast. Around the same time, Anne Wall Thomas met Mary Leath Thomas who recommended her for a position in the art department at the University of Georgia.
Going along with this suggestion, Anne Wall took the job and met Howard Thomas who taught art at Georgia between 1945 and 1965, after a short stint at the Women’s College, her alma mater. Following Anne Wall’s arrival Mary Leath Thomas died in 1959, leaving Howard a widower. Subsequently, he married Anne Wall in 1960 and after his retirement in 1965 they moved to Carrboro, North Carolina. While living there she compiled her family’s genealogy and in 1969, The Walls of Walltown: The Known Descendants of James Wall of Anson County, North Carolina was published; although she continued to add to her research throughout her life.
Sometime after Howard’s death in 1971, Anne Wall Thomas left Athens to teach in the art department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. While there she pursued one of her husband’s interests—the derivation of pigments—and in 1980 she wrote and published, Colors from the Earth: The Artist’s Guide to Collecting, Preparing and Using Them.
Subsequently, Thomas moved to Virginia to become the director of the Greater Reston Arts Center (now known as the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art), established in 1974 to enrich community life by promoting and exhibiting contemporary art. During her decade-long tenure, she instigated the center’s move in the mid-1980s to expanded renovated spaces in an old warehouse. She then returned to North Carolina (probably Chapel Hill where she registered to vote in 1991) and became the administrator of the Southeastern College Arts Conference (SECAC), an organization devoted to research and education in the visual arts. It holds an annual conference and publishes a journal of scholarly articles on art, art education, and art history. Thomas served in that position for fourteen years and in 2001 she gave a paper at a SECAC conference entitled “Fifty Years and Counting.”
Despite her busy professional life as a teacher and administrator, Thomas produced visually strong work during her long life. Some compositions consist of overlapping squarish or triangular shapes while others explore the dynamics of positive and negative shapes. Her work explored a wide array of complex concepts through a visual language consisting of seemingly simple geometry and, at times, a minimal palette of primary colors.