I would say that Ms Thomas has a lot of ‘splainin to do.
She’s dead, Jim.
It's obvious: that particular motif was common among Afro-Americans in the years after slavery. Working long hours on plantations without oil colors and unconstrained by uptight European conventions like "prospective" or "geometry" or the "human form" or "nature" or bourgeois notions like "technique" or "beauty", they produced flat dull uninspired paintings in great numbers, but they were suppressed by the white establishment until an enterprising French artist whose creativity was exhausted adopted them and signed his name to them.