NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Lelong & Co. announced exclusive representation of the Mildred Thompson Estate. The gallery will present the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, Mildred Thompson: Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields, from February 22 to March 31, 2018. A catalogue with essays by Melissa Messina, Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate, and Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator Emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, will be published in conjunction with the exhibition by Black Dog Publishing. Concurrently, the gallery will present a solo booth of paintings and works on paper for the 2018 ADAA Art Show.

Mildred Thompson (1936 – 2003) created paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures using a signature style that often features fully saturated color segments painted in linear and circular formations inspired by music and science. Although she was relatively unknown in the United States during her lifetime, her work has recently gained increased institutional attention as artists of color receive long overdue recognition for their contributions to American abstraction. Spanning over four decades of prolific creation, Thompson’s works are characterized by energetic mark-making, profound understanding of color, and complex compositions that absorb the viewer. Thompson was deeply interested in physics and astronomy, and she sought to visually represent scientific theories and systems that were invisible to the eye through her own interpretation. The artist was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but spent the majority of her career in Germany and France due to the racism and sexism she experienced in the United States. In Europe, she created many established bodies of work and exhibited widely while also teaching. Thompson resided in Atlanta, Georgia, for the final fifteen years of her life. In Atlanta, Thompson was the associate editor of ART PAPERS magazine, taught at Spelman College, Agnes Scott College, and the Atlanta College of Art.

Thompson’s work was recently featured in the group exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, where it traveled from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. In 2016, the solo exhibition Mildred Thompson: Resonance, Selected Works from the 1990s was presented at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia. Thompson’s work can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States, including the prestigious collections of African American Art of Larry and Brenda Thompson as well as the Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, Michigan. Her work is also in many public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, among other institutions.