The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania is hosting "Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images," the first museum retrospective of Jamaican-American artist Mavis Pusey (1928-2019). Curated by Hallie Ringle and Kiki Teshome, the exhibition spans five decades and features over 60 works, including seven paintings shown publicly for the first time. Pusey, who studied at the Art Students League and worked at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, was known for her geometric abstraction at a time when many Black artists focused on figuration. The show will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
This retrospective matters because it corrects a significant oversight in art history: Pusey's work had nearly faded from memory, overlooked even as curators expanded the canon of 20th-century Black artists. The exhibition, which originated from a research project initiated by Thelma Golden in 2015, restores Pusey's unique voice in American abstraction and highlights the persistent efforts of curators to recover marginalized artists. It also underscores the importance of archival research and conservation in bringing long-overdue recognition to overlooked figures.