In 2017, curators Erin Dziedzic and Melissa Messina organized the exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction 1960’s to Today for the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.  This show focused on the art-historical contributions of women artists of color and took its name from a series of works by Mildred Thompson from the ’90s. Using incredibly rich and diverse media, each artist brought a unique perspective to abstraction that had been traditionally overlooked in the male-white-dominated field. The artist roster included Alma Thomas, Mildred Thompson, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Sylvia Snowden, Candida Alvarez, Betty Blayton, Chakaia Booker, Lilian Burwell, Nanette Carter, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Deborah Dancy, Abigail DeVille, Maren Hassinger, Jennie C. Jones, Evangeline “EJ” Montgomery, Howardena Pindell, Mavis Pusey, Shinique Smith, Gilda Snowden, Kianja Strobert, and Brenna Youngblood.  The exhibition later traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Magnetic Fields is an important and relevant project at a time when the art world is at last recognizing the contributions of women artists to the key moments in American art,” notes Lowery Stokes Sims, curator emerita, Museum of Arts and Design, and contributing author to the exhibition catalogue. “It not only expands the roster of artists working abstractly but also bravely tackles the quandary of black women artists who often have had to overcome familial uncertainty with their chosen careers, and have had to harness color, line and form to address the inevitable and unavoidable political and personal challenges they have faced in the world.

REF:  “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today.” NMWA, 29 May 2020, nmwa.org/press/nmwa-presents-magnetic-fields-oct-13-2017-jan-21-2018/. (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

Here at Black Art Auction, we have been honored to bring several works by many of these artists to the auction market.  Presently, we would like to spotlight five artists from this seminal exhibition that are being offered for sale this Saturday.

 Mildred Thompson (1936-2003)

Abstract sculptor, painter, and printmaker, Mildred Thompson was born in Jacksonville Florida, and attended Howard University where she studied under James Porter - the mentorship of whom had a profound effect on her and her work.  Thompson attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and earned a Max Beckmann Scholarship for study at the Brooklyn Museum School.  In 1962, she was also selected for the prestigious MacDowell Colony residency in New Hampshire.

Thompson experienced early success and acclaim for her work in the United States, but due to racial and gender inequalities, she decided to relocate to Germany where she taught and exhibited widely throughout Europe. She returned in 1974 when she began a series of artist residencies for the City of Tampa, Howard University, and Spelman College, but she continued split her time between the United States and Paris until 1986.  

“It was in the 1980s in Paris that Thompson began to paint abstracts, beginning with the series Rebirth of Life.   In these modestly sized canvases, thick layers of paint form complex abstract shapes in bright colors. In one from 1983, a mostly yellow background is filled with dots of pink, sky blue, and green, and contorting shapes appear in red and orange tones. The effect is one of a composition pulsing with life.” (1)

In addition to her work as an artist and educator, Thompson also served as an associate editor of the publication Art Papers.

Her art practice was dedicated to making the invisible, visible - and she drew from a wide variety of media - letting the inspiration choose the manner of representation.

In recent years, Thompson’s art has been featured at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA;  the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art;  2018 Berlin Biennale; and  The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver.

(1)  Duron, Maximiliano. “How Mildred Thompson’s Vibrating Canvases Envisioned Our World as It Could Be.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 23 June 2021, www.artnews.com/feature/who-was-mildred-thompson-why-is-she-important-1234596582/.

Howardena Pindell (b. 1943)

Lot 123 , East-West Music Making Angel, 1986
gouache, tempera, postcards, on museum board
27 x 35 x 7 inches
signed, dated and titled verso in pencil

Exhibited: Women Only! In Their Studios, Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami (February 16-March 30, 2008)

Estimate: $250,000-350,000

A similar example from this series is included in the permanent collection of The Mint Museum, and the description of their work is relevant to this example:

“Howardena Pindell experimented with various forms of collage throughout her career, from her provocative works made up of hole punches in the 1970s to the dynamic curving forms of her "Autobiography" series from the early 1980s, which includes The Mint Museum's East/West (Gardens). Pindell created the series after a severe accident in 1979 left her with short-term memory loss. The "East/West" part of "Autobiography" utilizes postcards collected during her global travels, reconfiguring images from places that she visited into compositions that recall flashes of memories, perhaps echoing the way in which the brain works to piece together information. Gardens were sources of inspiration and solace to Pindell when she encountered racism and prejudice during a trip to Japan.” (REF: mint museum.org)

Sampada Aranke, an Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, wrote this about Pindell's Video Drawings for Document Space in Chicago (2018):

Pindell's Video Drawings series is a meditation on the hegemony of the (tele)visual, one that forms a critique by way of the blur. In Pindell's hands, blurring the image becomes a way to slow down the pace of image consumption in order to consider the multi-layered impacts of televisual images in everyday life. For these works, first Pindell drew an intuitive composition of lines and arrows onto sheets of acetate. These transparencies were then placed in front of a television screen, where the sheet would stick due to the static electricity that emitted from the screen. Sitting away from both the television and the camera propped in front of it, she would "watch" TV through the acetate, and decidedly take photographs with a cable release when she felt the image on TV compelled an interesting relationship with the drawn acetate composition.

This final image yields a "drawn" composition of a material meditation on the formal processes of image transmission and translation across media, coupled with then-current events, which also hauntingly remain relevant to the contemporary viewer. These works focused on sporting events in the mid-1970s and Pindell turned to images from war-torn countries throughout the 1980s.

Video Drawings move away from the clarity presupposed by the photographic, and instead make room for the generative processes of televisual translation as a signpost of contemporary life. If, as Guy Debord would have it, the "society of the spectacle--an endless loop of mediation and image-consumption where our leisure time is merely another form of work" best characterizes post-WWII life, then Pindell's particular mode of photographic capture asks us to rethink the influence of televisual in our everyday lives. We can situate Pindell's series, which began in the mid-1970s, within a history of video art, which emerges earlier in that decade. Many early video artists were particularly interested in how television reshaped what could be considered "art," in many of the same ways that photography had done in the 19th century.

Nanette Carter (b. 1954)

Nanette Carter grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, where her father was the city’s first black mayor and her mother, a vice principal and dance teacher.  She attended Oberlin College majoring in art history and studio art (painting and printmaking).  Carter studied abroad at the Accademia belle arti in Italy and went on to obtain her MFA at Pratt Institute.

After graduation she taught the private Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey from 1978-1987, when she received a grant from Cinque Gallery, NY which created a residency for her funded by the New York State Council for the Arts.  Carter was able to support herself as a full-time artist for the next 17 years.  She began teaching again, part-time, at Pratt Institute in 2001 until 2021.

Carter has exhibited her work widely both nationally and internationally and is included in the permanent collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA, and many more.

Evangeline Montgomery (b. 1930)

Evangeline Juliet, “EJ” Montgomery was born in New York.  Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a homemaker.  As a teenager, she discovered her affinity for creating art when she received a paint set as a gift.   Montgomery graduated from Seward High School in New York City.  In 1955, she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and studied at the Los Angeles City College (1955-58) and Cal Sate, Los Angeles (1958-62). Montgomery lived in Nigeria from 1962-1965.  Upon her return, she earned a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1969.  She also studied at UC Berkeley (1968-70).

EJ worked as an artist in several mediums, including printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and jewelry design.  She was also a very important administrator and advocate of African American art.  She worked as a curator at the Oakland Museum from 1968-1974, and organized the retrospective show on the work of Sargent Johnson.  Montgomery was impressed with Johnson’s work in enamel and successfully executed works of her own in that medium.

Montgomery moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980 to work as a community affairs director for WHMM-TV.  Shortly thereafter, in 1983, she began working with the United States Department of State as a program development officer for the Arts America Program, organizing overseas exhibitions for American artists—including African American artists.

Mavis Pusey (1928-2019)

Mavis Pusey was best known for her hard-edge, non-representational images.  This was very much her singular focus throughout her entire career. Pusey was born in Jamaica in 1928. Her parents died when she was young. An aunt taught her to sew, and her first job was cutting fabric in a garment factory in Kingston, Jamaica.  When she was 18, Pusey went to NY to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion.  Due to financial constraints she began attending classes at the Art Students League instead, where she studied painting and printmaking over the next four years.  One of her teachers was Will Barnet.

When her student visa expired, Pusey went to London, and then Paris, where her first solo exhibition was held at Galerie Louis Soulanges in 1968.  When she returned to NY, her work Dejyqea (oil/canvas, 72 x 60 in.) was included in the important exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America, held in 1971 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.  She worked with Robert Blackburn at his workshop for three years and was struck by the energy and constant movement of the city. Many of her prints from this period reflect a focused interest on the city’s construction.  Pusey also taught at various institutions throughout her career including Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research.  She moved to Virginia later in her career.

In 2017, her work was included in the exhibition, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today.  It was the first U.S. presentation dedicated exclusively to the formal and historical dialogue of abstraction by women artists of color.  Her work will also be the subject of a major exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.

Pusey’s work is found in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.