Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images
By Chenoa Baker for The Brooklyn Rail
September 2025
By virtue of the title, Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, movement is the goal of the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. Its namesake is a 1970 work, likely made during Pusey’s time in London given its foggy quality, at the end of the exhibition. The show ushers us into three sections—the body, construction, and music—but offers more than categories. It extends a generous intimacy and whispers a different narrative, one far more humanizing of a woman attuned to the rhythms of the world around her.
Mavis Pusey (1928–2019)—the Jamaican-born multi-hyphenate fashion designer, poet, painter, printer, Virgo—relished the geometry and improvisation of the urban landscape: its chaos and care, its poetry and possibility. That duality of order and disorder pervades her work and is even incorporated into her word-scrambled titles. Again, duality appears in the handwritten, marked-up work she gave to a printer, on display in the exhibition; she valued order but often intentionally embraced jumbled disarrangement. In an alphabetical list of desires, Pusey wrote, “I want my memory and the ability to concentrate fully and permanent[ly]. I want strong wavelength.” The list meanders from pragmatic goals to wild-card hopes—winning the lottery, inheriting money from an unknown source. She continues with equal fervor: “I want to be more aggressive in presenting my art and myself. I want to improve my personality and to become magnetic and attractive.”