Lava Thomas: Lineage @ Jessica Silverman
As part of Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, presented by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), the gallery will host an exhibition walkthrough with the artist, led by Cornelia Stokes, Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora at SFMOMA and MoAD on Friday, October 2, from 5–7 pm.
Jessica Silverman is delighted to present “Lineage,” the gallery’s first exhibition with Lava Thomas, opening on September 10 and 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.
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.