African American artist Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) lived and worked in Germany and France from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. In her work, she developed a modernist visual language to interpret natural and cosmic phenomena. This exhibition celebrates Thompson’s representations of light and energy, charting early influences from her time living and working in Paris in the mid-1980s to later works created upon her return to the United States.
The selected paintings, assemblages and works on paper, as well as aqueous gouaches and subtle prismatic color pencil drawings, show a remarkable ability to reinterpret the natural world into imaginative atmospheres based on a constant and personal interpretation of the universe. Works from two of her significant painting series – "Radiation Explorations and Advancing Impulses" – also highlight Thompson’s approach to abstraction.
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. In recent years, as understandings of abstraction have shifted to become more inclusive of women artists of color, her work has increasingly received institutional attention.
