Lava Thomas: Homecoming

May 2022, English, 9.5 x 12.5 in, 70 pages, softcover, full colorEdition of 1000Design: Sming Sming Books Edited by Bridget R. CooksWith texts by Bridget R. Cooks, Bertis D. English, and Jennifer Jankauskas Through her immersive drawing installations and painstaking attention to detail, Lava Thomas creates opportunities to celebrate the beauty of African American life. Lava Thomas: Homecoming brings three bodies of her work together for the first time, Looking Back (2015–2021), Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (2018­–), and Decatur (2022). These works demonstrate Thomas’s dedication to exploring personal and cultural narratives of survival and bravery against the odds.  Thomas’s line-stroke drawings, Mugshot Portraits: Women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, depict women who were arrested for participating in the 1955–56 boycott. Across a diversity of age, size, and class, these women planned and participated in the first mass action of the modern Civil Rights M