“She’s a Real 20th Century Figure”: Thelma Golden on the ICA’s Mavis Pusey Retrospective
By Emma Schartz for Interview Magazine.
July 18, 2025
Mavis Pusey knew what she wanted: communion with nature, a vibrant social life alongside fellow artists, and to finally overcome her fear of driving at night. She also wanted to build her own world of ideas through artmaking and, in her own words, “$1,000,000 from unexpected sources.” All of this comes through in Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia’s latest exhibition, co-organized with the Studio Museum in Harlem. Walking through two floors of Pusey’s paintings and archival materials, this desire infiltrates the architecture, providing the fuel for her prodigious output, much of which ultimately fell into obscurity.
Across massive canvases and hard-edge prints, Pusey translated the clamor of urban construction and gentrification into fractured planes, sharp diagonals, and rhythmic blocks of color. Buildings stretch and collapse; cities thrum in gridded hues of rust, ochre, and deep cobalt blue. In one painting titled “Within Manhattan,” overlapping rectangles seem to vibrate in place. Her compositions usher the dust particles of 1970s New York into lines, gesturing toward both the past and future. Born in 1928, Pusey arrived in New York at 18 and would spend the next several decades moving from the Art Students League to Robert Blackburn’s printmaking workshop to exhibitions in Paris and London, culminating with a landmark showing in the Whitney Museum’s Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition in 1971. “She’s a real 20th-century figure,” says Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum, whose discovery of Pusey’s work in an auction catalogue sparked the collaboration. “You feel the way in which she not only envisioned an artistic path for herself, but a place in the world.” Ahead of the show’s opening last week, I spoke to Golden and curator Hallie Ringle about the decade-long process that led to Mobile Images, Pusey’s bathtub garden, and what the artist’s work reveals about timeless ambition.