By the time artist Mavis Pusey died in 2019 at 90, she was living at the home of her caregiver in rural Virginia. Her bold, singular artworks, which had once graced the walls of museums, were sold off in bankruptcy proceedings; her name largely forgotten by the art world that had spotlighted her decades earlier.
Pusey moved to New York from Jamaica to pursue fashion in 1958, but stumbled into a painting class. As a rare Black woman creating abstract art, Pusey earned illustrious credits, selling a print to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, appearing in the Whitney’s 1971 exhibit “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” and landing teaching gigs at Rutgers University and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
But the art world’s recognition soon evaporated, along with Pusey’s funds. While her peers received attention from major institutions, her work was consistently overlooked and marginalized.
In 1988 she left New York for a quiet life teaching art in Virginia and seemed to fall off the map entirely.
Today, a posthumous renaissance of her works is underway; earning international acclaim, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
Her first solo museum show, “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images‚” opened at West Philly’s Institute for Contemporary Art last month — and over the next two years, it will travel to Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
It’s the kind of attention that curators say is long overdue.
“As was true for so many women artists who were active at that time, and Black women abstract artists in particular, Pusey was working in a field that was not completely open to her,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. “What resulted is a story that is far too common: that of a truly groundbreaking artist who was years ahead of her time yet is only now fully acknowledged for her contributions.”
In the final years of Pusey’s life, curators began looking more closely at her pioneering work with the hopes of correcting what they consider a historic injustice and “an institutional failing,” said Hallie Ringle, chief curator and interim director of the Institute for Contemporary Art.
“The wrongs that were done to [Pusey] are the reason that she’s having a show here right now,” said Ringle, who began a decade-long journey tracking down Pusey’s artwork while working for Golden in New York. “It happens to be why we have to do the show right now, and that we don’t already know her name — why she’s not Andy Warhol in our day to day, right?”
When she first started researching in 2015, Ringle had been struck by Pusey’s originality, and the way she used geometric shapes and vibrant colors to evoke construction sites, machinery, musical instruments, and dancers’ movements.
“I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings,” Pusey once wrote. “The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction.”
As Ringle’s curiosity deepened, she dug into public records to find the artist. She had heard that Pusey had died, but connected with Pusey’s social worker. It was around 2016, and the artist was then living with dementia in the home of her caregiver. And her paintings were nowhere to be seen.
Seven years prior, Pusey filed for bankruptcy after incurring debt from years at an assisted living facility. By 2011, the state of Virginia had repossessed and sold her collection of paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels — what her lawyer said in court documents were “the only items of personal property owned by the debtor.”
A small gallery just outside of Boston paid $15,000 for some 50 artworks, the highest offer out of three bids. The monumental painting Within Manhattan (1977), for example, which Pusey had once showcased in PAFA classrooms, was one of the masterpieces sold, along with several proofs. In the years since, museums and private collectors have acquired several of Pusey’s creations, often coming from Massachusetts art dealer Mark Brock.
“The state took everything, including all of her work, like all of her paintings, so she basically just had the clothes on her back,” said Ringle. “This is truly a terrible story. What we want for artists like Mavis, is for this to never happen again right now.”
The bankruptcy offered an entry point for Ringle, who led the painstaking process of locating Pusey’s works after they traveled as far as Los Angeles and London. That meant countless phone calls and emails, deep dives on eBay, restarting her Facebook account, and maintaining hope for years on end that she would be able to find enough to constitute a significant show.
The curator finally traveled to Orange, Va. to meet the artist in 2018. They traveled to Washington D.C. one cold day in February for Pusey to see her painting Recarte at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“To be honest, she couldn’t talk very much, so it was really hard to get to know her,” Ringle recalled. “But you would say things like, ‘Mavis, I love your art,’ and she would say, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’ She was always very gracious, and just genuinely surprised that you liked her work, which was so sweet.”
That same year, a second stash of Pusey’s prints was found in a garage.
“No one knew this art existed, until it was discovered,” said Hannah Hutman, the bankruptcy lawyer in Virginia who led the second proceeding. “I believe it was discovered in the garage of her conservator, or of one of the individuals that had been appointed to help [Pusey] wind down her affairs.”
Hutman was put in charge of selling the newly found works, nearly 40 in total, to pay off the remaining debt. Pusey died around the time that the auction went public, and thanks to a New York Times obituary, interest in her pieces skyrocketed, with 35 interested parties including institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Studio Museum.
The Petrucci Family Foundation, based in Asbury, N.J., purchased the lot for $50,501 in 2019, which covered the remaining debt and administrative costs. About $11,000 was left over for Pusey’s estate, which went to her daughter, Yvonne Palmer, in Toronto, who also inherited Pusey’s copyright.
Meanwhile, Ringle, who was working as curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, pushed for a major acquisition of one of Pusey’s most well-known paintings, Dejygea (1970). The piece had been featured in the Whitney exhibit in 1971 and then last year, more than half a century later, it returned to the Whitney for the museum’s signature Biennial, leading Artsy to name Pusey a “breakout artist.”
Now in Philadelphia, Dejygea reunites with more than 80 works: paintings like Within Manhattan and Recarte alongside other treasures, like Pusey’s fashion designs, poetry, and letters. Ringle hopes that this increased visibility will help the world better understand and appreciate Pusey’s creative output across media. In addition to the exhibit, the Institute of Contemporary Art will host a symposium on Pusey and Jamaican modernism later this fall.
It’s the exact kind of moment Ringle wishes Pusey could have experienced herself. The curator sees the ways that Pusey’s work still resonates with audiences and she can’t wait for more people to get to know the artist better.
“We’ve just had an incredible number of people doing really good work and getting excited about Mavis, making sure that her legacy is cemented and in the canon,” said Ringle. “Like for better or worse, we hate the canon and we love the canon, and we just want Mavis to be in it.”
“Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images” through Dec. 7, at Institiute of Cntemporary Art, 118 S 36th St., Phila., icaphila.org
