ABSTRACT
Alma Thomas painted Watusi in 1963 in Washington, DC, where she lived. In 2009 right-wing bloggers charged Thomas with "plagiarism" after the obamas installed Watusi in the White House. Curiously, the comments' insistence that the artist's identity is the work's most salient feature echoes the scholarship on Thomas. Thomas's artistic practice was a daily effort to cultivate the beauty she saw throughout the world around her. Dancing may have appealed to Thomas as a "beautiful behavior," but it related to racial and gender identity in a number of subtle but specific ways in Washington. For Washington's modernization would not erase lines of social difference as much as it would remap the city to remove that which was different from view. Time, too, would begin to impinge on Thomas's relation to the city's modernization. Even as the city's modern lines closed in on Thomas, she continued undeterred, drawing her own lines.
