Mildred Thompson’s Retrospective Can’t Contain Her Expansive Universe

At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.