MILDRED THOMPSON

For more than five years in Paris, Thompson furthered her formal and conceptual artistic investigations.This included a remarkable ability to interpret colour found in the world around her in imaginative atmospheric scapes. The exhibition takes its title from two intimately scaled 1982 collages Thompson made in Paris. The bright palettes and improvisational compositions are an indicative precursor to much of the work she created in the following two decades. l’Appel de la Lumiere features several works on paper from the artist’s time in Paris and pieces created shorty after her departure from France. Aqueous gouaches and subtle prismatic colour pencil drawings demonstrate Thompson’s constant personal interpretation of the universe. Also on view in the first gallery is a piece (c. 1975) from Thompson’s renowned body of work in wood.

In the second gallery dynamic pastels, watercolours, and paintings from the 1990s and 2000s are characterised by energetic mark-marking, profound understanding of colour, and complex compositions.Works from two of her significant painting series–Radiation Explorations and Advancing Impulses–are on view and demonstrate Thompson’s signature approach to abstraction. This work has received increased institutional attention in recent years as understandings of abstraction shift to become more inclusive of women artists of colour.

Mildred Thompson was born in 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida, and died in 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Washington, DC in 1957, under the tutelage and mentorship of the pioneering African American art historian James A. Porter. Recently her work has been included in significant group exhibitions including Magnetic Fields: Expanding AmericanAbstraction, 1960s to Today, which travelled from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, KansasCity, Missouri to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, and Museum of FineArts, St. Petersburg, Florida; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, which traveled from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia to Crystal Bridges Museum ofAmerican Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado_;_ and DoroOlowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. In 2019, Spelman CollegeMuseum of Fine Art presented a solo exhibition of her work entitled Mildred Thompson: The AtlantaYears, 1986-2003. In 2018, her Wood Pictures were featured in a solo presentation, Mildred Thompson:Against the Grain, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale. Thompson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the NationalMuseum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; VirginiaMuseum of Fine Arts, Virginia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,Texas; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge Massachusetts; and Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, D.C., among other institutions.