“I could do more with painting if I could say something with the body.”
From performing for the Queen of England to educating children about global folklore, Thelma Johnson Streat’s bright, brief career eludes strict categorization. Her early realistic portraits captured her subjects in vivid detail, while her interpretive dances held international audiences’ attention for hours without the help of props. Perhaps most enduring as objects of scholarship and exhibition, however, are her abstracted paintings that sought to connect the cultures and souls of people around the world.
Born Thelma Beatrice Johnson in Yakima, Washington, in 1911, Streat moved around the Pacific Northwest during her childhood, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon. Marked by a particularly exclusionary and racist history, including being home to what was once the largest chapter of the Ku Klux Klan west of the Mississippi River, Oregon proved hostile to the small Black population that lived there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The young Streat, whose African American and Cherokee heritage left her “a lonely child,” was no exception.
By the time she graduated from high school in 1932, Streat had already begun to show her work, receiving an honorable mention for a portrait included in Negro Artists at the International House, a New York exhibition sponsored by the Harmon Foundation. Later that decade, after marrying her first husband, Romaine Streat, she moved to San Francisco, where she worked as an artist for the Works Progress Administration. While there, she met Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and assisted him on his Pan American Unity mural. Rivera called Streat’s work “one of the most interesting manifestations in this country at present,” and “extremely evolved and sophisticated enough to reconquer the grace and purity of African and American art.”
It was also while living in San Francisco that Streat created Rabbit Man (1941). MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, purchased the small gouache painting directly from Streat in 1942, making her the first African American woman to have a work in the Museum’s permanent collection. The same year, it was shown at the Museum in the exhibition New Acquisitions: American Painting and Sculpture.
The work shows a figure rendered in red, black, and shades of gray surrounded by a shimmering golden color field. Its body is heavily abstracted, a fact that complicates potential interpretations of the image. Are viewers seeing a human, a rabbit, a mask, or something altogether different? What we do know about, however, is the wide range of cultural production that Streat engaged with, from the arts and culture of the Haida people of the Western coast of Canada to the paintings of Pablo Picasso, whom she once regarded as “the greatest living artist in the world.” Some have tried to map these varied influences onto Rabbit Man, while scholar Abbe Schriber took an expanded approach, tracing these influences while also exploring “the implication of motion” made apparent in the artist’s work by the tilted head and extended, reaching arms.
In 1946, Streat began to perform interpretive dances, sometimes in front of her paintings and accompanied by music or poetry. The figure in Rabbit Man poses with arms held high, a gesture echoed in a promotional photograph for one of Streat’s performances. In enacting the gestures that appeared in her painted works while onstage, Streat gave life to her figures, embodying them in performance and imbuing her static images with a lifelike dynamism.
Streat toured Europe, receiving rave reviews before returning to the United States and eventually settling in Hawaii with her second husband, Edgar Kline. There, they opened the New School of Creative Expression, which sought to educate children about multiculturalism through folklore and the arts. In 1959, while studying anthropology at UCLA, Streat died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 47. Since then, her work has been shown sparingly, though recent scholarship has aimed to revive interest in her career and her goal of uniting people of varying backgrounds through art and culture.
Simon Ghebreyesus, MoMA and Studio Museum Curatorial Fellow, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2024
Note: Opening quote is from Wilma Morrison, “Portland Interpretive Dancer Wins World Acclaim, Professes She Prefers School Work to Club Glitter,” The Oregonian, September 4, 1951, 13.