Steffen Thomas Museum of Art

About the Museum  

The mission of the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art is to provide opportunities to engage, to learn, and to be inspired through Steffen's life, art, and legacy.

Established in 1998, the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art (STMA) is one of a handful of single-artist museums in the United States. STMA is dedicated to preserving and exhibiting the work of Steffen Thomas (1906-1990), a German-American master artist, and to providing art education programs for children and adults in rural Northeast and Middle Georgia. Steffen’s philosophy of the Brotherhood of Man – that we are a family of universal commonalities and that arts education is integral to a vibrant and connected community – informs all we do.

As Steffen used to say: Come In, and Joy in Art!

About Steffen Thomas

Steffen Thomas was born in 1906 in Fürth, Germany. Apprenticed to a stonecutter at the age of 14, Steffen excelled and at age of 17 he was accepted to the School of Applied Arts in Nuremberg. At the age of 19, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where he achieved “Master Artist” status within two years. 

Thomas paid his own way to the US when he was 22 years old. He worked in Florida and Alabama, before settling in Atlanta in 1930. The “Young Bavarian Sculptor” soon became well known and was actively receiving commissions. By 1931 he converted an outbuilding into a studio behind the Studio Arts Assembly at the corner of Peachtree and 14 St., where he continued to work for 10 years.

During this time, Thomas met—and six weeks later, wed—Atlantan Sara Douglass. He became an American citizen in 1935 and continued his work as a sculptor, supporting his new family by creating busts of famous Americans, including the noted scientist George Washington Carver and Dr. Crawford Long.

In 1941 Thomas bought 50 acres in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where he and Sara raised their four children in a home he built himself, stone by stone. Thomas created some of his greatest public sculptures in the Stone Mountain studio. He continued to accept commissions until 1955 when he was finally able to follow his muse and create the type of Expressionist art that is represented in the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art.