Mildred Thompson

An artist of voracious and varied interests, Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) was an abstract painter, sculptor, and printmaker who believed that art can be a means of attaining a state of spiritual transcendence. Deeply influenced by astronomy, physics, and music, especially jazz and the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, Thompson was also fascinated by studies of synesthesia – the cross-sensory experience of visualizing sound or hearing color and form. She was drawn to the writings of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who likely experienced sound as color, on abstract form and color as expressions of spiritual enlightenment; explorations of individual autonomy, self-identity, and spirituality by German-Swiss novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877-1962); and theories of the collective unconscious put forth by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1975-1961). Like the abstract painter Alma Thomas (1891-1978), Thompson was, as curator Kathran Siegel writes, a “crusading believer in the superiority of abstraction and its ability to resonate with meaning.”1

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, Thompson earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Howard University in 1957. She spent a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, renowned as a center of artistic experimentation and exploration, and pursued graduate studies in painting at the School of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Following further study at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst (School of Fine Arts) in Hamburg, Germany, she returned to New York, where she achieved some recognition as an abstract painter. Yet Thompson was excluded from the social and artistic circles of the city’s abstract artists; like other Black women working abstractly, she was omitted until recently from art historical accounts of abstract expressionism and from exhibitions of American abstraction.2

Seeking artistic freedom as well as respite from the racial and gender discrimination she encountered while attempting to establish herself as an artist in the United States, Thompson returned to Germany in the early 1960s. She spent much of the following decades teaching and exhibiting there and traveling throughout Europe, returning to her country of origin for prestigious and highly coveted artist residencies. In the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, like other African American artists who eschewed representational imagery in favor of modernist abstraction, such as Norman Lewis (1907-1979), Thompson again found herself on the margins – this time of the Black Arts Movement.3

Thompson’s Wood Picture (c. 1967) is one of several three dimensional “pictures” that she constructed from found pieces of milled and hewn lumber during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Arranged in rows, the variations in these wood fragments, their slightly syncopated placement, and the random-appearing placement of the nails in these pieces of wood, some hammered in straight and some bent at an angle, enliven the geometric arrangement of Wood Picture, dislocating it from an immediate association with the minimalist grid. Thompson’s assemblages in wood bear resemblance to the monochromatic wooden wall pieces made by the American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988; born Russian Empire, now Ukraine) beginning in the 1950s, though in Wood Picture Thompson left unpainted the wood components nailed to their painted backing, emphasizing its organic materiality and vitality.

In 1986, Thompson settled in Atlanta, Georgia, as an invited artist-in-residence at Spelman College. From 1990 until 2000, she taught at the Atlanta College of Art and served as the associate editor of Art Papers. She also continued to paint, remaining devoted to abstraction as a profoundly expressive visual language. Melissa Messina, Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate, writes that in Atlanta during the 1990s, “Thompson cemented her conceptual interests and iconography. She allowed herself the consistent time and space to expand her scale, to complicate her color palette, to explore the intersections of her interests, and to make ever-more complex compositions... She sought harmony in the spiritual and the material, the intuitive and the factual, connecting the seemingly distant worlds of science and metaphysics in an attempt to locate universality, or at least a space of commonality from which we can derive understanding.”4

Thompson drew upon her interest in the invisible forces shaping the universe in Magnetic Fields (1991). This painting is part of a series, also titled Magnetic Fields, in which the color yellow predominates. For Thompson, yellow signified magnetic energy. The painting’s thickly textured marks and calligraphic lines, in richly saturated hues, simultaneously invoke the magnetic attraction of microscopic particulate matter and the swirl of galactic forces. The dynamic vortex of energy at its center suggests the pull of gravity within an infinitely expanding universe. In another series from the 1990s, Music of the Spheres, Thompson fused her knowledge of astronomy and physics with her synesthetic visualization of musical sound. Art historian Lisa Farrington evocatively describes this series of paintings, in which Thompson rendered the rhythms, melodies, and harmonies of music in abstract lines and mosaic-like brushstrokes of luminous color, as “a symphony of the solar system and unseen dimensions” that “embodied the wonder of the cosmos and the ability of music to elevate the soul.”5

“My work in the visual arts is, and always has been, a continuous search for understanding,” Thompson said. “It is an expression of purpose and reflects a personal interpretation of the universe.”6 Her explorations of abstraction as a personal and transcendent visual language make visible the harmonies of realms beyond our sight.

Melanie Anne Herzog