Judy Thomas

Biography

Judy Thomas studied painting, drawing and printmaking at the University of Iowa, spending a summer at Yale's Norfolk school and graduating in 1982. A course in astronomy with James Van Allen, Mandelbrot's fractal geometry and Brian Eno's ambient music all shaped her early abstraction. With a Fondation des Etats-Unis fellowship she went to Paris to work with S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17, where she learned automatism, the surrealist practice of letting each line respond to the last. After three years in West Germany she earned an MFA in painting at Hunter College in 1988.

Thomas then joined the wave of young artists settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, making large temporary sculptures in abandoned waterfront warehouses and taking part in the Pier Shows in Red Hook and outdoor shows at Fulton Ferry State Park. Her webs, nests and tendrils of colored tubing and stretched fabric appeared in the Byrdcliffe Outdoor Invitational, at Brandeis University and the Arsenal Center for the Arts, and in the Samuel Dorsky Museum's Worlds of Wonder (2014), and she designed installations for Octavia Cup Dance Theater.

Now based in Newburgh, she won a 2015 Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Commission for the community piece MATRIX:RENEWAL and showed the painting series Mapping in 2017. At Holland Tunnel Newburgh she was part of the 2018 grand opening, open studios in 2019, the 2022 two-person show Dynamic Duo with Toronto painter Judy Singer, and Reclamation (2025), for which she made Flair, a room-scale piece of PEX, Lycra, vinyl tubing, craft lace, plastic packaging film and wire.

Practice. Large, brightly colored sculpture and site-specific installation from flexible industrial and domestic materials (PEX tubing, hosiery, Lycra, vinyl tubing, lace, packaging film, wire), alongside abstract paintings that begin with automatic drawing and explore chance, color and form.