At 41, Ms. Thomas might be called a precocious late bloomer. In age, she belongs to a generation of courageous artists who emerged mostly in the 1990s to explore black identity without stinting on innovation — among them Glenn Ligon, Chris Ofili, Ellen Gallagher and Kara Walker. But Ms. Thomas, who was born in Camden, N.J., and lives in Brooklyn, has been exhibiting for only six years. Although interested in art since childhood, she set out to be a lawyer and segued into painting when she was in her 20s and living in Portland, Ore., where she had moved to get some space after coming out as a lesbian to her mother.
Returning to the East Coast, she earned her bachelor’s in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2000 and her master’s two years later from Yale, where she arrived an abstract painter and left a figurative one, thanks largely to a suggestion that she take a photography course. She starting photographing her mother, then other family members, then friends and lovers. Soon she was converting those pictures into collages and paintings. Her gallery debut took place in Chicago in 2006, followed by one in New York in 2009.
The Brooklyn Museum show concentrates almost exclusively on work from 2010 and later, when a look at her development over the past decade might have better served her art and its audience. But Ms. Thomas’s work has strengthened noticeably since 2010, and this exhibition captures some of its momentum. (The show was assembled for the Santa Monica Museum by its former deputy director, Lisa Melandri, and adjusted for the Brooklyn Museum by its curator of contemporary art, Eugenie Tsai.)