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For Grails II, ICONIC curated the White House Association's first digital artwork. Designed by the brilliant Linda Dounia Rebeiz, "Sparrows Do Not Fear the Sun," is a unique digital art piece that pays tribute to the pioneering Black female artist, Alma Thomas, and her inspiring painting "Resurrection."
View on OpenSeaFor Grails II, ICONIC curated the White House Association's first digital artwork. Designed by the brilliant Linda Dounia Rebeiz, "Sparrows Do Not Fear the Sun," is a unique digital art piece that pays tribute to the pioneering Black female artist, Alma Thomas, and her inspiring painting "Resurrection."
View on OpenSea
Iconic & the White House Association, began by taking a deep-dive into the incredible archives of the White House Collection. Among countless moments in history, breathtaking photography, and incredible pieces of art, one bright painting of concentric circles stood out: Resurrection by Alma Thomas.
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Alma Thomas was a trailblazing African American artist renowned for her abstract paintings filled with vibrant color and rhythmic patterning. Born in 1891, she dedicated her life to art and education, serving as a public school teacher for many years before fully devoting herself to painting at the age of 69.
Her unique style, characterized by concentric circles and color-filled mosaics, captured the beauty she found in natural environments and the everyday world. Her painting "Resurrection" (1966) is the first artwork by a Black woman to be acquired by the White House Collection, a testament to her groundbreaking role in the American art scene.
Despite the challenges of racism and gender bias, Thomas broke barriers and remains an enduring symbol of perseverance and creativity. Her innovative work continues to inspire artists today and reaffirms the essential role that Black women have played in shaping the history of modern art.
In 1966, at the age of 74, Alma Thomas painted Resurrection. Painting from her living room, she observed patterns represented in light and nature outside her window and organized changing light and smaller patterns into her paintings.
"I decided to try to paint something different from anything I'd ever done. Different from anything I'd ever seen. I thought to myself, that must be accomplished. So I sat down right in that chair, that red chair here in my living room, and I looked at the window. And you can see exactly what I saw, right before my eyes, from where I was sitting in the chair. Why, the tree! The holly tree! I looked at the tree in the window, and that became my inspiration.
There are six patterns in there right now that I can see. And every morning since then, the wind has given me new colors through the windowpanes. I got some watercolors and some crayons, and I began dabbling. And that's how it all began. The works have changed in many ways, but they are still all little dabs of paint that spread out very free. So that tree changed my whole career, my whole way of thinking."
Linda is an artist, designer, and curator whose transdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between the immaterial and the material.
"Alma found delight in the sway of a leaf blown in the breeze, in the changing hues of a tree from one season to the next, in the quiet contemplation of nature's course. Serendipitously, over the last few months, nature has been at the core of my practice, by way of artificial intelligence. It all started last year when I decided to train my first GAN model with a database of my works - hand-painted acrylic abstract vignettes. I needed something to meditate on while creating the necessary volume of work to properly train the GAN; in my case, 2000 paintings. What better than nature as a focus of meditation?
Its expansiveness as well as its changing place in my life over the years provided me with enough inspiration to get through the vignettes. This was the biggest undertaking of my career as an artist, and I had no idea how drawn I would be to both the process and the results. All of my work today incorporates the outputs of this training and AI in general.
I have discovered more ways than I could have ever imagined to collaborate with AI, guided always by the exploration of phenomena in nature. Sparrows do not fear the sun is the beginning of a new direction in my collaboration with AI. In this new exploration, I bring outputs of my AI training into the canvas and integrate them back into my painting practice. There is something fascinating that happens in the journey from human to machine back to human. The process is long and leaves lots of room for contemplation and meditation on the natural phenomena I set out to explore.
In the case of Sparrows do not fear the sun, I focused on the only tree on my late grandfather's millet farm which provided the only shelter from an often cruel sun. It was a neem tree of modest size but a mighty capacity for cooling. Most importantly, it was easy to climb and one could see the whole spread of the farm from a few branches up. From up there, I would watch sparrows descend on the millet stalks to feed for short periods of time and fly back up. Their choreography was fluid and ever-changing, providing entertainment for long stretches of time. Unable to cope with the increasing demands for water and inputs as climatic conditions worsened, my grandfather eventually sold the farm, and with it, the neem tree, the rows of millet, and the sparrows that liked to feed on it. I am glad one of my earliest memories of communing with nature is still alive in my mind and lives on in my work. Thank you Alma for taking me back there."
