Lava Thomas debuts large-scale portraits of post-Emancipation ancestors at Jessica Silverman

Lava Thomas, East Side Elementary Schoolhouse, 2026. Graphite and Conté pencil on paper, 63 7/8 x 92 7/8 x 2 3/4 inches / 162.2 x 235.9 x 7 cm.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.— Jessica Silverman is presenting “Lineage,” the gallery’s first exhibition with Lava Thomas, running through October 24, 2026. Known for her monumental portraits, Thomas’s newest body of work focuses on figures from her own ancestry in post-Emancipation Texas. On view will be eight large-scale graphite and Conté pencil drawings on paper alongside a series of hand-drawn reproductions of archival documentation. Following the gallery exhibition, works in the show will travel to Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas for “Lava Thomas: In Our Own Regard,” curated by Michaela Haffner, Assistant Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper opening November 7, 2026.

At five feet tall and nearly eight feet wide, East Side Elementary Schoolhouse (2026) is the artist’s first architectural portrait. Depicting the modest building where generations of Thomas's family were educated, the drawing renders its weathered wood siding down to the grain, while leafless, spindly trees that flank the structure reinforce its sense of longevity. Built in 1882, the schoolhouse is a historic landmark, standing as both a testament to Black communities’ commitment to education and evidence of the inequities imposed by segregation.

In 2013, a chance discovery led her to uncover her grandmother's photo album—a trove of family photographs from the early twentieth century. Subsequent years of research expanded this personal discovery into a deeper engagement with public records and an archive built through legal struggle and deliberate acts of documentation. For more than a decade, these materials have shaped a sustained body of work within her practice. Thomas's portraits position her ancestors—direct descendants of enslavement—within a tradition of commissioned portraiture historically associated with social consequence and permanence. From van Dyck to Manet, European portraiture placed Black figures at the margins, often subordinate to a central white subject. Thomas overturns this hierarchy, placing her ancestors where Western art traditions failed to.

As a child, Thomas spent hours drawing and listening to the stories of elder women who gathered in her grandmother’s beauty shop. She distinctly recalls a calendar on the salon wall that featured the work of Chicago Black Renaissance artist Charles White. For young Thomas, White was a North Star, showing her how a disciplined hand could shift cultural perceptions. From Maya Angelou to the women who led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, Thomas’s portraiture has centered on people who have triumphed over hardship and performed heroic acts of self-determination.

Three portraits distinguish their sitters in diamond-shaped frames. In Unnamed but Not Unknown II (Promise) (2026), one of the artist's female ancestors appears within a faceted graphite border whose painstaking construction echoes the attentive labor of the portrait itself, extending Thomas's act of preservation beyond the figure.

Four works feature full-length portraits that recall early 1900s Black studio photography where clothing and furnishings project self-possession and agency. In Grace and Bearing (2026), featherlight linework depicts a female ancestor in a string of pearls and billowing skirt; dense charcoal creates a velvety black shawl that drapes across her shoulders. In I Stand Upright in My Own Regard (2026), a male ancestor dressed in a double-breasted overcoat returns the viewer’s gaze without deference, his eyes intensified with a tint of brown watercolor. Standing beside a Victorian wicker chair—decades before the photograph of Huey P. Newton seated in a Peacock chair became an icon of Black liberation—Thomas's ancestor embodies a long visual history of Black self-fashioning and autonomy.

The exhibition also presents graphite reproductions of obituaries, military pension files, and landmark signs. Recomposed by hand, these legal and visual documents become integral to Thomas's account of family lineage—recording, verifying, and transmitting it.

In "Lineage," what begins as one family's story becomes an argument for how Black history persists. Though rendered in erasable materials, Thomas’s drawings insist upon permanence. Their materiality reflects the precarity of the historical record, while their scale and labor affirm the enduring significance of their subjects. At a moment when the federal government is targeting museums and monuments in an attempt to suppress public memory of Black life in the United States, “Lineage” advances a cultural imperative to assert their lives as constitutive of American history.

Lava Thomas (b. 1958, Los Angeles, CA) studied at UCLA in the Department of Art, during which time she held a J.P. Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship. She earned a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which later awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. Thomas has also received an Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and Artadia Award. In June 2026, Thomas’s work was included in the inaugural presentation of art at the newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, and in November 2026, she will enjoy a solo exhibition at Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX. In 2024, the San Francisco Arts Commission unveiled Thomas’s Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman: A Monument to Honor Dr. Angelou outside the city’s Main Library. Thomas has enjoyed previous solo exhibitions at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama; Berkeley Art Center in California; and Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at ICA San Francisco and many university art museums, such as the Kemper Museum at Washington University; Alain Locke Gallery at Harvard University; Hunter College Art Galleries and Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Her work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Berkeley Art Museum; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others. Thomas serves on the California College of the Arts Presidential Advisory Board and the Board of Headlands Center for the Arts. Her debut solo exhibition with Jessica Silverman opens September 10, 2026. Thomas lives and works in Berkeley, CA.