Mildred Thompson

Mildred Thompson (1935-2003) grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Her formal art training began in 1953 when she entered Howard University in Washington, DC. There she found a mentor in James Porter, who was head of the school's art department. He arranged for Thompson to receive a scholarship at the end of her junior year for summer study at Skowhegan School of Painting and sculpture in Maine. After receiving her Bachelor of Art from Howard, Porter assisted Thompson in entering the Brooklyn Museum of Art School on a Max Beckmann Scholarship. She began to exhibit and was accepted in the Art U.S.A. '58 exhibition in Madison Square Garden.

During that time Thompson also applied and was turned down for a Fulbright Scholarship. Feeling herself ready for study in Europe, Thompson decided to go there on her own. She worked to save money during the rest of the school year and got a summer teaching job at Florida A7m University in Tallahassee. In this way she earned enough for steamship passage to Europe.

Her trip to Germany was attended by good fortune. She had decided to study at the Fine Art Academy in Hamburg even though, at the time she arrived, she had not yet applied or been accepted there. Nor did she have any plans as tow where she would live. A few private lessons were all she had to prepare herself for the German language. Nevertheless, armed with pluck, a strong portfolio and the help of some brand-new German friends, she found a room and was immediately accepted into the Academy.

At the Academy she learned etching, lithography and other printmaking media. During her initial term, she had her first solo show at a private gallery in Hamburg, and at the end of her first year she received a scholarship that paid for her living and school expenses. After three years at the Academy, Thomson was ready to begin her professional career in the United States. In early 19560 she returned to New York City. The social and artistic acceptance Thomson had enjoyed in Germany, however, was not to be found even in the most cosmopolitan of American cities. She soon realized that because she was a black woman, she was refused the shows and gallery representation that her work deserved. After two years, she returned to Germany, this time to Berlin, where she established herself and once again began exhibiting and selling her work.

After ten years in Germany with travels to southern Europe and Africa, Thompson returned to the U.S. in the mid-1970s. The social climate had changed somewhat for the better. Thompson was able to draw upon her reserves of self-confidence and perseverance to overcome many of the obstacles she encountered. She lived at first in Florida where she was named Artist-in-Residence at Howard University for the 1977-78 academic year. In 1981 she returned to Europe, this time to Paris, where she opened a studio in the Rue de Parme. Thompson moved to Atlanta, Georgian in 1986 which was "home base" for the remainder of her life. There she taught art and art history in several area colleges, including the Atlanta College of Art. A talented writer, she was also an associate editor of the periodical Art Papers.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thompson's art was influenced by astronomy, spiritualism, and metaphysics. "My work has to do with the cosmos and how it affects us," she told Essence magazine in a May, 1990 feature. Exploring the unseen in her work extended to the workings of the physical world as well as to the spiritual one. The look of unseen waves of light (or perhaps sound0 is Thompson's subject in the series of vitreograph prints that she created at Littleton Studios.

The artist's work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the museum of Modern Art, new York; The Brooklyn Museum; American Federation of Arts, New York and Howard University, Washington, DC, among others. Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections in the United States and Europe.

Written by Ellen Fischer, director of The Littleton Collection gallery

EXTENDED BIO

Mildred Thompson (1936–2003) was an African-American artist who worked in the media of painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. She was also a writer and, beginning in 1987, was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture;[2] they have also cited German Expressionism, music (both American jazz and classical European music,[3] and Thompson’s readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics[4] as important artistic influences. Thompson grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Her formal art training began in 1953 when she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. There she found a mentor in James A. Porter (1905–1970), who was head of the school’s art department. He arranged for Thompson to receive a scholarship at the end of her junior year for summer study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. After Thompson received the Bachelor of Arts from Howard, Porter assisted her in entering the Brooklyn Museum of Art School on a Max Beckmann Scholarship. She began to exhibit, and her work was accepted for the Art U.S.A. ’58 exhibition in Madison Square Garden.[5]

During that time Thompson applied and was turned down for a Fulbright Scholarship. Feeling herself ready for study in Europe, Thompson decided to go there on her own. 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. In this way she earned enough for steamship passage to Europe.[6] In 1987 Thompson's show ”In and Out of Germany”, at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta, contained 42 artworks executed in Germany, France and the United States. The Atlanta newsweekly Creative Loafing mentioned that Thompson’s most recent series of colored pencil drawings, “Objective Music,” were based on Thompson's correlation of art with music. It also made reference to her sense of color and rhythmic line-making as “Kandinsky-influenced.”[16] A contemporary review of the exhibition in Art Papers also mentioned Kandinsky as an influence for Thompson, as well as the artist’s interest in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. But Thompson’s feeling for music seemed to have the strongest effect on the work in the exhibition. The reviewer, Leslie Schworm, wrote that Thompson’s “…approach is to draw music or sound. She believes that patterns in music are among the purest natural recurrences, providing direct access to something basic.”[17]

In the following year the visual description of music was still on Thompson's mind. A solo exhibition titled Concatenation at Agnes Scott College contained a wooden sculpture titled Mass whose six parts were titled Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Gloria Dei.[18] But other influences, including astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics were starting to appear in her work. Included in Concatenations was a series of prints titled Five Mysteries. Their abstract compositions, printed in black ink on white paper, were schematic representations of earth, atmosphere and 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.”[19] A series of colored pencil drawings, “The Phases of Cynthia”, was reported by the same writer to refer to Galileo’s study of the phases of the moon. The drawings featured “…the same sun/moon image as the prints. The circles are layered with other geometric shapes and surrounded by fragments and rays emitting from the center.”[19] In 1990 Thompson told Essence magazine that “My work has to do with the cosmos and how it affects us.”[20] Such references continued in her printmaking. 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 Thomspon's art. The catalog’s essayist, Corrine Jennings, wrote that “The idea that man and certain animals can hear the sounds of eleven or twelve octaves, but can only see one octave of seven colors, has led to [Thompson’s] interest in exploring the unseen and making it visible.”[21] The Magnetic Fields series of paintings that Thompson exhibited in the show, Jennings wrote, “…appear to visualize the force of unseen energy. They are intensely painted, tersely defined geometric structures with a direct physical application loosened by…improvisation.”[21] Thompson had a long and varied teaching career. From 1961 to 1964, when she was trying to make her way as an artist in New York City, she taught elementary school as an employee of the New York Board of Education. In Düren, Germany she taught art and art history at the Eschweiler Volchoch Schule from 1965 to 1974. On being named Artist-in Residence for the City of Tampa[22] Thompson taught classes and workshops in painting, drawing, sculpture, and mural painting to adults and children at the Tampa Bay Art Center and other local venues. She also had an "open door" policy at her studio on 7th Avenue in Ybor City. There, she wrote, "...anyone who wanted to come in and see could walk in. I felt it somehow served the community."[23] As an Artist-in-Residence at Howard University she taught etching. 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. From 1986 to 1989 she taught studio classes, art history and art theory at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, and in Atlanta she taught at Morehouse College and Spelman College. From 1986 she taught at the Atlanta College of Art.[24]

REFERENCES

Perry, Pam (1987), “The ear and the eye meet in the work of Mildred Thompson,” Creative Loafing, Section 6B, October 3, 1987.

Jump up ^ Jennings, C. (1992), "A/Cross Currents: Synthesis in African American Abstract Painting", Kenkeleba House, Inc., New York City.

Jump up ^ Thompson was an amateur musician who studied French horn in her youth and later classical guitar. Perry, Pam (1987)

Jump up ^ Staff writer “E.P.”, Essence, May 1990, p. 86.

Jump up ^ Thompson, M. (1977) "Mildred Thompson, Sculptor: Experiences of a Black Artist in Europe and the United States”, p. 20, James A. Porter Gallery of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC.

Jump up ^ Thompson (1977), p. 24.

Jump up ^ Thompson (1977) pp. 24–25.

^ Jump up to: a b Thompson (1977), p. 28.

Jump up ^ The son of German Expressionist artist Max Liebermann, William Lieberman (1923–2005) was an influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art from 1945–1979 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1979–2004.

Jump up ^ Thompson (1977), p. 28. One of the prints, "Love for Sale" (1959), was reproduced in the book Fille de Joie, Grove Press, 1967.

Jump up ^ David C. Driskell (1978), “Bibliographies in Afro-American Art”, American Art Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1978, p. 385.

Jump up ^ Alexis de Veaux (2006), Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, W.W. Norton & Co., p. 175. ISBN 0-393-01954-3

Jump up ^ Mildred Thompson, "Memoirs of an Artist", SAGE A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, Vol. IV, No.1 (Spring 1987), pp. 42–43.

Jump up ^ Thompson (1977), p. 31.

Jump up ^ Irlbeck, A. (2001), "Artist, teacher, musician to speak on Warhol exhibit," Lubbock Online.com Wednesday, January 17, 2001(www.lubbockonline.com/stories/011701/upd_warhol.shtml) Accessed 5/23/08.

Jump up ^ Perry, 1987.

Jump up ^ .Schworm, L. (1988), “Mildred Thompson, Goethe Institute, Atlanta, Georgia, September 11–October 17”, p. 59, Art Papers, January/February 1988.

Jump up ^ Gay-Griffin, L. (1989), “Exhibit explores depth of spirit,” p. 16D, Daily News, Lawrenceville, Georgia, Saturday, November 25, 1989.

^ Jump up to: a b Gay-Griffin (1989)

Jump up ^ Essence (1990).

^ Jump up to: a b Jennings (1992)

Jump up ^ The residency was awarded by the Florida State Arts Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jump up ^ Thompson, M. (1987), "Memoirs of an Artist, p. 42, SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, 10/1:42.

Jump up ^ 1993 resume for Mildred Thompson.