“Mildred Thompson: Frequencies” is the most comprehensive solo museum exhibition to date for American artist Mildred Thompson. Bringing together approximately fifty works from 1959 to 1999, the exhibition surveys Thompson’s multifaceted practice, featuring paintings, sculptures, etchings, drawings, assemblages, and musical compositions. Throughout her peripatetic career, Thompson worked across media and disciplines, drawing from both scientific research and a poetic pursuit of abstraction to explore the limits of perception. Often featuring radiating swirls of color and gesture, her diverse bodies of work seek to visualize extremes of scale—from the human body and built environments to microscopic particles and the vastness of the cosmos.
While abstraction is central to her practice, Thompson’s earliest works also engaged with figuration and architecture. After relocating from the United States to Germany in the late 1950s, she created surreal, figurative drawings and etchings, often depicting female figures. In the late 1960s and 1970s, her focus shifted to built environments, as seen in her “Wood Pictures” series, abstract minimalist compositions made from found wood. These works, featuring intricately constructed linework and sometimes incorporating hinges or metal hardware, are reminiscent of architectural features and facades. The artist’s explorations of built space continue in her “Window Paintings” (1977), a series in which brightly colored, abstracted spaces appear to be framed by windows. After returning to the United States, Thompson moved away from observational forms toward schematic compositions that bridge her earlier figurative works and her later abstract paintings.
Drawing from a wide range of influences, Thompson sought to transcend prescribed identities and gender roles in her artistic practice. Extending beyond painting and sculpture, her works on paper from the 1970s and ’80s highlight her inventive approach to printmaking and drawing, from intricate intaglio prints of amorphous forms (“Death and Orgasm” series, 1978) to expressive watercolors of celestial constellations (Pleiades III, 1988). Her paintings from the 1990s delve into the invisible forces of particle physics and quantum mechanics (“String Theory,” 1999) and magnetic fields (Magnetic Fields, 1991). In her “Radiation Explorations” series (1994), she translated radiation and UV light into luminous colors and gestural brushstrokes.
Later in her career, Thompson focused on cosmologies and astrological phenomena. For the first time in over three decades, a significant selection of her “Heliocentric Series” (c. 1990–94) will be on display in this exhibition. These paintings are presented alongside her largest paintings, the series “Music of the Spheres” (1996). Depicting Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, each of the four paintings is accompanied by an original electronic music composition by Thompson. The tracks, collectively titled Cosmos Calling, evoke science fiction soundtracks and Afrofuturist music. Thompson described them as “a journey through the soundscape of space inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings.”
Mildred Thompson (b. 1936, Jacksonville, Florida; d. 2003, Atlanta) studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Howard University, Brooklyn Museum School, and University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (Hochschule für Bildende Künste). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2019); New Orleans Museum of Art (2018); SCAD Museum of Art, Atlanta (2016); Leopold Hoesch Museum, Dueren, Germany (2009); Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art (1997); James A. Porter Gallery of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC (1975); Harvard University, Cambridge (1975); and Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen (1973), among many others. Thompson’s work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Howard University, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among numerous other institutions. In addition to her artistic practice, Thompson was as an educator and served as associate editor of Art Papers from 1989 to 1997.
“Mildred Thompson: Frequencies” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and curated by Stephanie Seidel, Monica and Blake Grossman Curator.
