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THELMA JOHNSON STREAT (1911 - 1959)
Confirmation.
Gouache on illustration board, circa 1942-43. 495x394 mm; 19
1
/
2
x15
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2
inches
Provenance: The G Place Gallery,Washington, DC; private collection; thence by descent to the
current owner, private collection, CO.
Exhibited:
New Names in American Art
,The G Place Gallery,Washington, DC, with the gallery label on
the frame verso; The Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago, October 7 - October 31, 1944.
The G Place Gallery at 916 G Place, NW, open from 1942 -1947, was run by Caresse Crosby who
attempted to show more modern works by both European and American artists, including African-
American artists like Streat, in Washington, DC. Crosby organized this traveling exhibition of
African-American art with works by over 35 artists including Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Selma
Burke, Elizabeth Catlett, Eldzier Cortor, Sargent Johnson,William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence,
Norman Lewis, Horace Pippin, Charles White and Hale Woodruff.
Confirmation
is an extraordinary example of a modernist painting by Thelma Johnson Streat, and a
fascinating representation of African-American womanhood.Another gouache of hers,
Rabbit Man
,
1941, was the first painting by an African-American woman to be exhibited and purchased by the
Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, in 1942.
Confirmation
conveys Streat’s focus on the many abstract
forms found in Native American, Asian and African art - a modernist interest she had in common
with the Bay Area sculptor Sargent Johnson. Indeed, there are strong stylistic similarities between
this figure and Johnson’s sculptures
Forever Free
, 1933 and
Negro Woman
, circa 1935, both in the
collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Born on August 29, 1912, in Yakima,Washington, Streat began painting at the age of seven and
received art training at the Portland Museum Art School in the mid-1930s. Streat moved to San
Francisco in 1938 and began working in Works Progress Administration art programs. She
participated in exhibitions at the DeYoung Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and others.
She also painted murals that attracted attention for their intense content, such as her 1943
Death of
a Black Sailor
, which drew threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Her work is found in the collections of
the Museum of Modern Art, Mills College, Oakland, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the
Honolulu Academy of the Arts; a one-person retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Portland
Art Museum in 2003.
[5,000/7,000]
