“When I was a kid, I would lie in bed in the morning and have this feeling that something amazing could happen,” says artist Barbara Earl Thomas. “It didn’t always happen, but there was that feeling that it could. That’s still how it is when you’re in the studio working. It’s just crazy wonderful to be able to still feel that.”

Thomas’ ideas move fluidly across mediums—egg tempera, linocut and woodblock prints, etched glass, metal, and, over the past decade, large-scale cut-paper and Tyvek installations that hang like luminous lace, scattering shadows across space.

Thomas is not only a prolific artist but a vigorous cultural advocate. Her decades of leadership helped shape the region’s cultural landscape, including her pivotal role in founding the Northwest African American Museum, where she served as executive director until 2012, when she shifted her focus fully to her art.

Since then, Thomas has mounted exhibits at Seattle Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery and completed major public art commissions, including stained-glass windows for Yale University’s Hopper College and laser-cut steel panels for Sound Transit’s soon-to-be-unveiled Judkins Park Station.

In 2025, Thomas went transatlantic. She was selected to create a permanent installation for the city of Nantes, France, marking the 45th anniversary of the Seattle-Nantes sister-city alliance. In September, she traveled with a 15-member Seattle delegation to unveil The Garden Gate, a set of towering cut-steel doors alive with her signature filigreed imagery.

That same month, Jacob Lawrence | African American Modernist opened at Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands—the first major European retrospective of Lawrence’s work. Thomas was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to life, from its conception to helping secure loans from private collectors across the U.S. and beyond. Along with the exhibition’s 170 works by Lawrence, the show features four portraits by Thomas, who studied under Lawrence at the University of Washington.

“Part of my life is keeping Jacob’s profile high,” she says—a commitment that shows up not just in museum exhibitions, but in the legacy unfolding within her own studio walls.