The Seattle artist Barbara Earl Thomas is developing "There Will Be Light," an immersive, chapel-like installation planned for the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington, in 2027. The project is described in a studio-visit essay by Amy Chaloupka, the museum's chief curator, published on September 18, 2026, on the website of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
According to Chaloupka, the walls of the installation will be lined with expanses of finely hand-cut Tyvek, a synthetic material Thomas values because it is durable and easy to cut. Lit niches set into the walls will hold blown and cast glass objects, creating a gentle play of light and shadow. The story Thomas intends to tell inside the space is still taking shape.
During the visit, Thomas was modeling a small plasticine figure she called a gremlin, the first of several to be cast and attached to glass candelabra alongside beetles and snakes climbing their stems. Chaloupka presents this sculptural work as the start of a new direction that builds on more than four decades of practice. "Making is thinking made seen," Thomas told her, describing a practice that moves between building, painting and printing in glass, paper, steel and other materials.
Thomas's storytelling draws on her family's roots in the American South. She was raised by fishermen from Louisiana, Texas and Florida who moved west and, in the 1940s, settled in Seattle's redlined Central District; she was among the first generation of her family born in the Pacific Northwest. Her eight linocuts "The Book of Fishing" (2006–2013) reflect that heritage, while a series of egg tempera paintings made between 2014 and 2016 links mass die-offs of red-winged blackbirds to the violent deaths of young Black men.
One of her signature techniques is cutting thick black rag paper with craft knives to build narrative scenes, then adding letterpress and hand-printed color behind the linework to produce a glowing, stained-glass effect. Recent cut-paper works made in tribute to her teacher and mentor Jacob Lawrence, who taught her at the University of Washington in the 1970s, were shown this year alongside his work in his first major European retrospective at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Earlier, her "Transformation Room: Packaged Black" (2021) was installed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.
