In the early 1960s, abstract artist Mavis Pusey 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, who saw Pusey’s 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.
Curator Hallie Ringle recounted this story while walking through “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images” at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the late artist’s 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, where the exhibition will travel in 2027, “Mobile Images” is the result of a decade of research into Pusey’s vibrant life and fifty-year career.
Though prolific in her work and well-connected, Pusey, like many other women artists of her time, was largely overlooked within art history. “She 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,” Ringle explained. “Mobile Images” 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’s creative output and contextualizes the political and social shifts during her life.
Experiments with geometric abstraction
Born in Jamaica in 1928, Pusey lived in New York until 1988—with stints in London and Paris—before 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’s 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.
The exhibition pairs these works with archival materials that reflect the artist’s 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. “Fashion design offered Pusey a means for a different kind of creative expression,” said Teshome. “Her designs for clothing have more details and are more ornate than her paintings, and we get a sense of her own personal style.”
Pusey in Paris
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. “The city was exploding,” Ringle said. “Millions of people were in the streets. Pusey was surrounded by all of this.” 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.
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’s friend, the piece is a “psychological portrait,” Ringle explained, inspired by an interaction the two had with police officers during the uprising. “They were stopped, and Eric talked to the police and got them out. Mavis asked, ‘weren’t you afraid?’ Eric said, ‘I was terrified, but on the inside.’”
Pusey’s archive contextualizes these prints from Paris, showing the unrest through newspaper clippings, as well as examples of other students’ protest posters. Though Pusey’s 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.
Depicting the city
Pusey’s 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. “While 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,” Ringle said.
As in her other works, there are subtle references to the social and political issues of urban life. Her titles, in particular—like Decaying Construction (no date), Demolishment (no date), and Re-Gentrification (1986)—convey 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.
While Pusey’s career may have been underrecognized during her time, “Mobile Images” is an important step towards giving the artist her due. The fact that women artists and Black women abstract artists were historically overlooked didn’t seem to deter her. Thanks to her prolific career and devotion to documenting issues of the time in her archive, Pusey’s place in the art historical canon is slowly, and rightly, being revived.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/aty52Pd
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