Mildred Thompson

Mildred Jean Thompson (March 12, 1936 – September 1, 2003) was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography.

Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture;[1] they have also cited German Expressionism, music (both American jazz and classical European[2]) and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences.

[3] Posthumously, her work was part of the 2017 exhibition "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction," at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, Missouri.

She worked to save money during the rest of the school year and, through the auspices of Samella Lewis (1924–), got a summer job teaching ceramics at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee earning enough for steamship passage to Europe.

Nevertheless, armed with pluck, a strong portfolio, and the help of some brand-new German friends, Thompson found a room and was immediately accepted into the academy.

[8] After three years at the academy, in early 1961, Thompson returned to New York City to begin her professional career in the United States.

[9] She was not alone; other young black artists who chose to leave the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s include Harvey Cropper, Herbert Gentry, Arthur Hardie, Clifford Jackson, Sam Middleton, Earl Miller, Norma Morgan, Larry Potter and Walter Williams.

In the words of artist David Driskell, "They chose a form of cultural exile over expatriation, hoping for a better day to come about in the land of their birth.

Thompson established herself in the Rhineland town of Düren and once again began exhibiting and selling her work there and in the German cities of Bensberg, Aachen, and Cologne.

[15]After ten years in Germany (during which she traveled to southern Europe and Africa), in 1975, Thompson returned to the U.S. She found that the social climate had improved somewhat and was able to overcome many of the obstacles she previously encountered.

[18] A talented writer and interviewer, she also joined the staff of the periodical Art Papers in 1987,[19] the same year she presented a solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institute Atlanta.

The curator, Henry Flood Roberts Jr., said "People were knocked out by Mildred's large and colorful canvases and a roomful of her bird-like sculptures."

In 2009, Leopold Hoesch Museum and Schloss Burgau, in Düren, Germany, where she lived, presented a retrospective of her work entitled, "Mildred Thompson: A Life Long Exploration."

The next year, Galerie l’Aquarium in Valenciennes, France, exhibited her Wood Pictures and the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia, "Making the Invisible Visible: Photographs and Works on Paper by Mildred Thompson."

Her work was part of the 2017 exhibition "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction," the following year [20] at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, Missouri.

[12] In 2018, Galerie Lelong in New York City started to represent her estate, presenting a solo exhibition, "Mildred Thompson: Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields."

[19] Another contemporary review of the exhibition in Art Papers also mentioned Kandinsky as an influence, as well as Thompson's interest in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious.

Their abstract compositions, printed in black ink on paper, were schematic representations of earth, atmosphere and the sun, the latter a flat disc set in a sky filled with energetic marks and scratches.

Thompson's series of watercolors, titled Lemurian Wanderings, were described by critic Lorena Gay-Griffin as “…the time at the dawn of the world before the first ray of sun shone through the atmosphere."

In 1993, as an artist-in-residence at Littleton Studios in North Carolina, Thompson created prints in vitreography titled Helio Centric, Particles, and Wave Function.

A 1992 group exhibition entitled A/Cross Currents: Synthesis in African American Abstract Painting featured a catalog that cited the jazz of Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk and the German baroque of Bach as influences on Thompson's art.

The Magnetic Fields series of paintings that Thompson exhibited in the show, Jennings wrote, "appear to visualize the force of unseen energy.

When she lived in Paris, Thompson gave private lessons at her studio at 4 Rue de Parme from 1981 until her return to the States in 1985.