Mavis Pusey at the ICA

Movement, emotion, and abstraction.

“I love buildings that’ve been torn down, though I hate to see them torn down,” the painter and printmaker Mavis Pusey (1928–2019) once mused. “You will see sadness and yet you see forms of movement and emotion,” she continued. “I fantasize about what happened inside of them.”

The Jamaican-born artist reached her creative apogee in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. Bucking art-world pressures to center her own racial or sexual identity within her work, Pusey instead gravitated toward geometric rhythms and relationships. One abiding inspiration was the urban regeneration playing out in her Chelsea neighborhood, whose invigorating and messy gentrification she documented in paintings like Within Manhattan (1977) before that very dynamic ejected her from the apartment building where she long lived. Pusey also made hard-edge color field paintings that in some instances depicted recognizably human figures and in others veered toward purer abstraction. In yet another vein, she channeled musical inspirations—be it guitar necks, vinyl record covers, or the sounds of the 1968 Paris student protests—into prints where angular geometries erupt against pulsing parallel lines to evoke the shifting tempos she sensed in her surroundings.

Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art is presenting more than 60 of Pusey’s works alongside artist notes, correspondence, and other ephemera in a comprehensive retrospective that constitutes the first major museum survey dedicated to her. Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, curated by Hallie Ringle, the ICA’s interim director and Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator along with Kiki Teshome of the Studio Museum in Harlem, is on view through December 7. —TP