American artist
Mildred Jean Thompson (March 12, 1936 – September 1, 2003) was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music (both American jazz and classical European) and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine "Art Papers".
Thompson had solo exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut, Agnes Scott College, Howard University, Harvard University, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, and the Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren and Hochschule für Kunst und Design in Halle, Germany, among others. Posthumously, her work was part of the 2017 exhibition "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction," at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, Missouri.
In addition to those at her gallery Galerie Lelong in New York City, there were solo exhibitions of her work at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Berlin Biennale in 2018 and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in 2019.
Early life, education, and career.
Mildred Jean Thompson was born on March 12, 1936, in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up there. Her formal art training began in 1953 when she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was mentored under James A. Porter (1905–1970), the head of the school's art department. He arranged for Thompson to receive a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. After Thompson received the Bachelor of Arts from Howard in 1957, Porter assisted her in entering the Brooklyn Museum of Art School on a Max Beckmann Scholarship. She began to exhibit, and her work was accepted for the "Art U.S.A. ’58" exhibition in Madison Square Garden.
Study in Europe.
After being rejected from a Fulbright Scholarship to Europe, Thompson decided to go there on her own. She worked to save money during the rest of the school year and, through the auspices of Samella Lewis (1924–), got a summer job teaching ceramics at Florida A&amp;M University in Tallahassee earning enough for steamship passage to Europe.
Thompson's trip to Germany was attended by good fortune: She had decided to study at the Art Academy of Hamburg (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg) even though, at the time she arrived, she had not yet applied or been accepted. Nor did she have any plans as to where she would live. A few private lessons were all she had to prepare herself for the German language. Nevertheless, armed with pluck, a strong portfolio, and the help of some brand-new German friends, Thompson found a room and was immediately accepted into the academy. There her painting teachers were Walter Arno (1930–) and Emil Schumacher (1912–1999). She learned etching, lithography and other printmaking media from Willem Grimm (1904–1986) and Paul Wunderlich (1927–2010). She also met the printmaker Horst Janssen (1929–1995), who introduced her to Galerie Sander in Hamburg, where Thompson had her first solo exhibition. At the end of her first year she received a scholarship that paid for her living and school expenses.
Career.
After three years at the academy, in early 1961, Thompson returned to New York City to begin her professional career in the United States. The social and artistic acceptance she had enjoyed in Europe, however, was not to be found even in that most cosmopolitan of American cities. Thompson soon realized that because she was a black woman, she was refused the shows and gallery representation that she felt her work deserved. In a 1977 autobiographical essay, Thompson wrote that "One woman dealer... said that it would be impossible for me to have a show in New York as an artist. [Another gallery owner said] ...that it would be better if I had a white friend to take my work around, someone to pass as Mildred Thompson." She did, however, gain an audience with William Lieberman, the son of German Expressionist painter Max Liebermann; Lieberman (1923–2005) was an influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Two of Thompson's prints were purchased for the collection on his recommendation.
In the fall of 1961 and again in 1962 Thompson received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she worked on drawings and paintings. In 1963 she returned to Germany to live, partly because she could find no sales outlet for her work, and partly because of growing racial tension in the United States. She was not alone; other young black artists who chose to leave the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s include Harvey Cropper, Herbert Gentry, Arthur Hardie, Clifford Jackson, Sam Middleton, Earl Miller, Norman Morgan, Larry Potter and Walter Williams. In the words of artist David Driskell, "They chose a form of cultural exile over expatriation, hoping for a better day to come about in the land of their birth." All settled in Europe. Thompson established herself in the Rhineland town of Düren and once again began exhibiting and selling her work there and in the German cities of Bensberg, Aachen, and Cologne.
Thompson's work in the 1960s was figurative, but in the early 1970s she moved toward total abstraction. In Europe her works reflected the formal ideas of art for art's sake, and did not respond to the politicized art of the Black and women's movements in the United States. According to writer Alexis De Veaux, "Thompson thought of herself as an expatriate and did not separate her identity as black from her identity as American" although she eventually disavowed "any claim to being American."
Years later Thompson defended herself against the charge that because of her years spent in Europe, she was not a true "Black" artist. In a 1987 essay for "SAGE" magazine she wrote: ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;
After ten years in Germany (during which she traveled to southern Europe and Africa), in 1975, Thompson returned to the U.S. She found that the social climate had improved somewhat and was able to overcome many of the obstacles she previously encountered. While her work was included in Art Expo '75 at the Tate Galleries in London, she herself lived at first in Florida, where she was named artist-in-residence of the City of Tampa under the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1977 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she was Artist-in-Residence at Howard University for the 1977–78 academic year and presented a solo show there and at Harvard University. Thompson met writer Audre Lorde in Nigeria in 1977, and the two were briefly romantically involved while Thompson lived in Washington, D.C.
After garnering Washington Bar Association's first-ever Artist of the Year award in 1978, Thompson returned to Europe in 1979, this time to Paris, where she opened a studio in the Rue de Parme. That year she exhibited in the group shows "Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, "Cross Pollination" at the Los Angeles Women's Building, and in "American Drawings II," at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. In 1982, her work was included in "Forever Free: Art by African-American Women 1862-1980," at the Center for the Visual Arts Gallery at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.
Thompson moved to Atlanta in 1986, which became "home base" for the remainder of her life. There she taught art and art history in several area colleges, including the Atlanta College of Art. A talented writer and interviewer, she also joined the staff of the periodical "Art Papers" in 1987, the same year she presented a solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institute Atlanta. She also wrote poetry which she would occasionally present with her artwork.
In 1990, Thompson had a solo exhibition entitled "Concatenation," at Agnes Scott College's Dalton Gallery in Atlanta. Two years later she presented a solo show of paintings, prints, and sculpture at Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, and in 1994 she had solo exhibitions at Auburn University, in Auburn, Alabama, and at the Hochschule für Kunst &amp; Design in Halle, Germany. In 1995, she had a solo show at the Kenkelaba House in New York City, and the next year had a solo exhibition of her prints and drawings at Rolling Stone Press in Atlanta.
Thompson was given a solo exhibition in her hometown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1997. The curator, Henry Flood Roberts Jr., said "People were knocked out by Mildred's large and colorful canvases and a roomful of her bird-like sculptures." Two years later she had a solo show at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta.
Thompson died September 1, 2003.
Posthumous exhibitions.
In 2009, Leopold Hoesch Museum and Schloss Burgau, in Düren, Germany, where she lived, presented a retrospective of her work entitled, "Mildred Thompson: A Life Long Exploration." The next year, Galerie l’Aquarium in Valenciennes, France, exhibited her Wood Pictures and the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia, "Making the Invisible Visible: Photographs and Works on Paper by Mildred Thompson." In 2015 Michael C. Carlos Museum of Art in Atlanta exhibited a solo show of her prints.
In 2016 SCAD Museum of Art in Atlanta presented a solo exhibition "Mildred Thompson: Resonance." Her work was part of the 2017 exhibition "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction," the following year at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2018, Galerie Lelong in New York City started to represent her estate, presenting a solo exhibition, "Mildred Thompson: Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields."
There were two other solo exhibitions of her work at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Berlin Biennale in 2018. In 2019 the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta showed "Mildred Thompson: The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003."
Thompson's New York gallery presented their second solo exhibition of her work in 2021 focusing on her assemblages and works on paper from the 1960s to the 1990s entitled "Throughlines." The same year Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, showed a solo exhibition of her work entitled "Helio Centric." Her latest solo exhibition was at New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, in 2022.
Influences in Thompson’s mature work.
In 1987 Thompson's show "In and Out of Germany," at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta, contained 42 artworks executed in Germany, France, and the United States. The Atlanta newsweekly "Creative Loafing" mentioned Thompson's most recent series of colored pencil drawings, "Objective Music," were based on her correlation of art with music. It also made reference to her sense of color and rhythmic line-making as influenced by Wassily Kandinsky. Another contemporary review of the exhibition in "Art Papers" also mentioned Kandinsky as an influence, as well as Thompson's interest in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. But Thompson's feeling for music seemed to have the strongest effect on the work in the exhibition. The reviewer, Leslie Schworm, wrote that Thompson's "approach is to draw music or sound. She believes that patterns in music are among the purest natural recurrences, providing direct access to something basic."
In the following year the visual description of music was still on Thompson's mind. A solo exhibition titled "Concatenation'" at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, contained the wooden sculpture "Mass", whose six parts were named "Kyrie", "Gloria", "Credo", "Sanctus", "Benedictus", and "Gloria Dei". But other influences, including astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics were starting to appear in her work. Included in "Concatenations" was a series of prints titled "Five Mysteries". Their abstract compositions, printed in black ink on paper, were schematic representations of earth, atmosphere and the sun, the latter a flat disc set in a sky filled with energetic marks and scratches. Thompson's series of watercolors, titled "Lemurian Wanderings", were described by critic Lorena Gay-Griffin as “…the time at the dawn of the world before the first ray of sun shone through the atmosphere." A series of colored pencil drawings, "The Phases of Cynthia", was reported by the writer to refer to Galileo’s study of the phases of the moon. The drawings featured "the same sun/moon image as the prints. The circles are layered with other geometric shapes and surrounded by fragments and rays emitting from the center." In 1990 Thompson told "Essence" magazine: "My work has to do with the cosmos and how it affects us." Such references continued in her printmaking. In 1993, as an artist-in-residence at Littleton Studios in North Carolina, Thompson created prints in vitreography titled "Helio Centric", "Particles," and "Wave Function".
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