{"id":13761,"date":"2025-07-21T20:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T20:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/13761\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T20:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T20:44:09","slug":"late-painter-mavis-puseys-geometric-abstractions-were-always-ahead-of-their-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/13761\/","title":{"rendered":"Late Painter Mavis Pusey\u2019s Geometric Abstractions Were Always Ahead of Their Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Annabel Keenan<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Mavis Pusey with her work Within Manhattan. Courtesy of Studio Museum in Harlem.<\/p>\n

Mavis Pusey, Impact on Vibration, 1968. Courtesy of the ICA Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, abstract artist Mavis Pusey<\/a> had her heart set on becoming a full-time fashion designer. She had been living in New York since 1957, after moving to the city from Retreat, Jamaica, at the age of 29 (or 18, as the artist preferred to say) to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. Unable to afford tuition, Pusey left and enrolled in the Art Students League with support from a Ford Foundation scholarship, but she maintained her ties with fashion by creating designs for clothing. At the Art Students League, she studied under the famed artist Will Barnet<\/a>, who saw Pusey\u2019s potential. The painter and printmaker encouraged Pusey to focus on art, telling her that it was her fate to be an artist and that she would become an incredible one.<\/p>\n

Curator Hallie Ringle recounted this story while walking through \u201cMavis Pusey: Mobile Images\u201d at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the late artist\u2019s first major museum solo show, which comes just years after her passing in 2019. Co-curated by Ringle and Kiki Teshome of the Studio Museum in Harlem<\/a>, where the exhibition will travel in 2027, \u201cMobile Images\u201d is the result of a decade of research into Pusey\u2019s vibrant life and fifty-year career. <\/p>\n

\"\"Installation views of \u201cMobile Images <\/p>\n

5<\/p>\n

View Slideshow<\/p>\n

Though prolific in her work and well-connected, Pusey, like many other women artists of her time, was largely overlooked within art history. \u201cShe was a woman artist, but she was also a Black woman artist working in abstraction; the art world has not been kind to Black women abstract artists,\u201d Ringle explained. \u201cMobile Images\u201d sets out to correct this. Spanning painting, drawings, prints, and an extensive archive that includes personal letters to other artists, the show shines light on Pusey\u2019s creative output and contextualizes the political and social shifts during her life. <\/p>\n

Experiments with geometric abstraction<\/p>\n

Born in Jamaica in 1928, Pusey lived in New York until 1988\u2014with stints in London and Paris\u2014before spending time working in Philadelphia and moving to Virginia. Inspired by fashion, Pusey often focused on abstracted human figures in her early work. In Suzy (1961), one of the earliest works in the show, Pusey depicts a model sitting with one leg propped up. Though flattened, the contours are subtly defined, and the skin color and shape of a body are clearly visible. Just one year later, Pusey depicted an even more flattened body in Lucy (1962), using color blocks to suggest different features, yet still depicting the model\u2019s form as a cohesive whole. As her work progressed, bodies became more abstracted, as in Recumbancy (1963), where the artist evokes body parts through geometric shapes. <\/p>\n

The exhibition pairs these works with archival materials that reflect the artist\u2019s continued interest in fashion. Included are examples of garments she made, some with similar minimalist geometric blocking and others highly patterned, as well as sketches and designs for clothing. Figures in these sketches often have flattened, yet recognizable, features. \u201cFashion design offered Pusey a means for a different kind of creative expression,\u201d said Teshome. \u201cHer designs for clothing have more details and are more ornate than her paintings, and we get a sense of her own personal style.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Mavis Pusey, Recumbancy, 1963. Courtesy of the ICA Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Pusey in Paris<\/p>\n

In May 1968, Pusey found herself in Paris as student protests that originally centered on the conditions of the education system escalated into a national general strike. \u201cThe city was exploding,\u201d Ringle said. \u201cMillions of people were in the streets. Pusey was surrounded by all of this.\u201d During this time, students began making protest screenprints and teaching others to do the same. Pusey also learned to screenprint at that time, and made a series of four prints inspired by music. In one, Paris, Mai-Juin (1968), the abstracted, frenetic shape of a guitar bursts across the composition in front of dense lines that recall musical scores, perhaps a response to the loud, electrified state of the city. <\/p>\n

Made at the same time, Eric (1968) also includes hints of musical notation symbols in a jumbled, chaotic swirl surrounded by a more orderly and partially bare background. Named after Pusey\u2019s friend, the piece is a \u201cpsychological portrait,\u201d Ringle explained, inspired by an interaction the two had with police officers during the uprising. \u201cThey were stopped, and Eric talked to the police and got them out. Mavis asked, \u2018weren\u2019t you afraid?\u2019 Eric said, \u2018I was terrified, but on the inside.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Mavis Pusey, Paris, Mars \u2013 Juin, 1968. Courtesy of the ICA Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Portrait of Mavis Pusey. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Archives, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

Pusey\u2019s archive contextualizes these prints from Paris, showing the unrest through newspaper clippings, as well as examples of other students\u2019 protest posters. Though Pusey\u2019s stances on the issues of the day remained ambiguous in the content of her work, subtle hints in titles and source materials illustrate her enduring concerns.<\/p>\n

Depicting the city<\/p>\n

Pusey\u2019s interest in architecture and technology is also apparent in the show. In Within Manhattan (1977), she depicts what appears to be a facade of a building with its inner construction revealed. Additional motifs like bricks and planks of wood are scattered across the surface. \u201cWhile some people might see this as a picture of a city falling down around us, for Mavis, the construction of the world was about the possibility of the future, about technology, about history,\u201d Ringle said. <\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Mavis Pusey, Within Manhattan, no date. Courtesy of the ICA Philadelphia. <\/p>\n

Mavis Pusey, Personante, no date. Courtesy of the ICA Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

As in her other works, there are subtle references to the social and political issues of urban life. Her titles, in particular\u2014like Decaying Construction (no date), Demolishment (no date), and Re-Gentrification (1986)\u2014convey her awareness of gentrification of the city, especially the swiftly changing area of Chelsea where she lived. The accompanying archival materials, such as images of makeshift housing in Central Park during the Great Depression, illustrate her concern for social issues throughout history, even if the content of her work remained more ambiguous. The archive also includes ephemera related to the U.S. Civil Rights movement and Black Power movements. <\/p>\n

While Pusey\u2019s career may have been underrecognized during her time, \u201cMobile Images\u201d is an important step towards giving the artist her due. The fact that women artists and Black women abstract artists were historically overlooked didn\u2019t seem to deter her. Thanks to her prolific career and devotion to documenting issues of the time in her archive, Pusey\u2019s place in the art historical canon is slowly, and rightly, being revived. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Annabel Keenan Portrait of Mavis Pusey with her work Within Manhattan. Courtesy of Studio Museum in Harlem.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[12686,12684,76,354,355,49,48,356,75,12685],"class_list":{"0":"post-13761","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-annabel-keenan","9":"tag-artist-profiles","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-design","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-mavis-pusey"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}