Lava Thomas has finally come to understand and accept her role. “I never thought of myself as an active seeker,” she says. “But for my family, ancestors, descendants, my role has been a seeker.” A multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Thomas is known for addressing issues of race, gender, representation, and memorialization. Her work centers Black experience, mining personal and national histories to recover and amplify erased voices and facilitate healing. The elegant balance of research and the experiential requires her to act as historian, writer, storyteller, archivist, and—whether she likes it or not—activist. “I look at history as being cyclical, especially in this country,” she says. “The bulk of my practice is really about uncovering, unearthing these hidden histories of Black women.”
While studying at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and the Bay Area’s California College of the Arts in the 1990s, she toyed with becoming a writer or a conservator. Ultimately, however, she found writing too “painful,” and when her internship at the Getty Conservation Institute exposed her to the photography of prominent artist Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas realized that she, as a Black woman, could make rather than conserve art. Her storied career confirms this. Thomas is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters purchase prize, an Artadia Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. The Berkeley-based artist’s work is held in permanent collections from Johannesburg to Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to San Francisco and has been exhibited at museums across the nation.
ACCIDENTAL HEROES
The things Thomas has found in her role as seeker include a photo album belonging to her grandmother, a beauty salon (2015), a site-specific installation composed of large-scale drawings of family members and an inverted pyramid made of tambourines hanging from the ceiling. The instruments move in the wind to create sound and cast shadows.
