This is “The Overlook,” a column by Sarah Cascone about the lives and work of artists who have been passed over, excluded from, or otherwise left out of the mainstream art world.
Mavis Pusey’s work almost feels kinetic. Humming energy flows through her geometric abstractions informed by the endless cycle of construction and rebuilding in her longtime home of New York. The late artist’s powerful images are currently the subject of two Los Angeles-area museum shows. But they came alarmingly close to being lost forever.
Born in Retreat, Jamaica, in 1928, Pusey was a painter, a printmaker, a poet, a fashion designer, and an educator. At the time of her death in 2019, her archive had been sold off to settle a bankruptcy case and her contributions to abstraction were all but forgotten. Now, her life and career are re-emerging from obscurity in “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images” at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and “Mavis Pusey: Restless” at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont.
Together, the two shows feature some 180 pieces by Pusey—60 at the Hammer and twice as many at the Benton—including oil paintings, etchings, silkscreens, drawings, and clothing, along with historic photographs and recovered archival materials. It is almost certainly the largest number of works by the artist on view at the same time, offering a well-deserved survey of Pusey’s distinctive vision.
“Some people just get forgotten, and it’s rather heartbreaking—but this is her turn,” Paulina Alvarez, the curator of the Benton Museum exhibition, tells CULTURED.
There are multiple people to thank for Pusey’s rediscovery. Just over a decade ago, Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, came across a work by Pusey in an online auction. Intrigued, she suggested that Hallie Ringle, then an assistant curator at the museum, start researching the artist.
In 2018, Ringle brought Pusey, then nearing 90, to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, where one of her works was on view. The artist, who had dementia, spoke very little, but Bob Lingo, her court-appointed guardian, shared a few prints with Ringle.
“It was clear she was so committed to her work, and had a very distinct taste and style,” Ringle, now the chief curator of the ICA Philadelphia, where the Hammer show debuted last summer, tells CULTURED. Sadly, it’s unclear how much Pusey was able to understand the renewed interest in her work, or to appreciate the significance of this wave of attention.
Across the country in LA, Ian White, the son of the late African American painter and printmaker Charles White, independently encountered Pusey on eBay in early 2019, just a few months before she died. As an extension of his work safeguarding his father’s legacy, White had begun trying to raise awareness about other worthy artists. He found Pusey to be an intriguing figure and eventually bought about 400 of her works. White also enlisted Alvarez, the director of special initiatives at the Charles White Archives, to learn more.
In parallel, Ringle and Alvarez worked to put together the pieces of Pusey’s life. The artist began sewing her own clothes at the age of 9, and worked as a pattern maker in a garment factory in Kingston in her teens. Pusey moved to New York at 29—although she later claimed to have been just 18—to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. She ended up studying art by mistake. After dropping out of full-time fashion school due to financial difficulty, she began working as a bridal gown draper and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League to keep up with her fashion education.
“Accidentally, I went into Will Barnet’s class of painting. After a month I said, ‘I think I’m in the wrong class,’” Pusey told the New York Amsterdam News in 1978. But by this time I had become so involved in my painting, I just stayed.”
Fashion continued to influence the artist, who even had her own label for a time, called Maviesey. Much of her early work grew out of the body, with Pusey breaking down the figure into abstract, increasingly fragmented shapes.
“I don’t think that there was really a huge separation for her, other than in the industry terms,” Ringle says. “The way her paintings are laid out like suggestions of the body, [it’s] as if they are pattern pieces.”
Pusey spent a few years in Europe, making prints and designing for Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. She had her first solo show at Galerie Louis Soulanges in Paris in 1968. Upon her return to New York the following year, Pusey became part of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. “That time, when she comes back from London and Paris, is incredibly prolific for her,” Alvarez says.
In a 1976 lecture that provides one of the rare examples of Pusey speaking about her work, the artist described her unceasing drive to create: “It’s like a disease; you can’t help yourself. You just do it. You’re broke, you have your last dollar, and you’ll buy paint or a pad or something like that.”
Along the way, Pusey developed her signature architectural abstractions of the urban landscape. The connections between the world around her and the worlds Pusey created on paper and canvas can be most clearly seen in the artist’s photographs of the city streets. Her black-and-white views captured seemingly mundane details of construction sites—wooden planks stacked on trucks, boarded-up fencing, piles of bricks—and transformed them into captivating abstract compositions.
“I really marvel at the way she went about creating these pieces and how intricate and how thoughtful and layered they are—like, literally layered,” Ringle says.
Though Pusey was never an art star, she did regularly exhibit her work until the late 1990s and taught at institutions including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the New School in New York. A career highlight came in 1969, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired her 1968 screenprint Frozen Vibration. The Whitney Museum of American Art also included her painting Dejygea in the controversial 1971 group show “Contemporary Black Artists in America.”
Pusey was clear about her ambitions. Among the more intriguing objects at the Hammer is a handwritten note, titled “I Desire,” that lays out her intentions. Items on the list include “to make enough money to live on, through my art,” “a very good dealer,” and “to create new and powerful works of art.” Sadly, only the latter proved within her control.
“That’s the challenge with so many Black women artists, right? That the mainstream art world wasn’t accepting them! This is absolutely a story of institutional failure,” Ringle says. “A less strong and less confident person might have quit—but not Mavis.”
Pusey stayed committed to her art even after being forced out of her Chelsea loft by her landlord in 1988. She settled in the rural town of Orange, Virginia, and showed several times in nearby Charlottesville while working at a boy’s boarding school. By the time the Studio Museum began taking an interest in her career, Pusey had been off the map for so long it was almost impossible to track her down.
Then, searching through Virginia court documents, Ringle turned up a 2011 bankruptcy record. As her mental faculties had deteriorated, Pusey had run into financial hardship paying for assisted living. To satisfy her debts, the state auctioned off her meticulously kept archive—identified in court documents as “the only items of personal property owned by the debtor.”
It was a nightmare scenario for any artist. But it wasn’t the end of the story. Thankfully, large caches of the archive stayed intact.
Two Massachusetts art dealers, Timothy Grinder and Mark Brock, each wound up with some of the work; Southern antiques dealers James Allen and John Littlefield also acquired parts of the archive. White’s eBay seller, a man identified only as Leo, rescued much of what didn’t sell from auction house dumpsters. White visited Leo in Virginia four times to buy works by Pusey, including the only surviving copper plate from her work; the Studio Museum also bought from him.
Another bankruptcy auction followed in 2019, shortly after Pusey’s death. The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art in New Jersey purchased the batch of nearly 40 works, which had been discovered in a garage, for $50,501.
Slowly, Pusey’s art began to be shown. She was included in “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today,” a significant traveling exhibition dedicated to abstractions by women of color that originated at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017.
In 2024, Pusey returned to the Whitney, this time as part of the Whitney Biennial, perhaps the most prestigious exhibition for any American artist. And in 2025, the Petrucci Family Collection loaned her work to “Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Now, with the Los Angeles showcase, Pusey is finally poised for more widespread recognition.
“My wildest hopes and dreams,” Ringle says, “is that she becomes just part of the fabric of art history, and is somebody who, when you think of geometric abstraction, is top of mind.”
“Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images” is on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles through Feb. 28, 2027. It will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem from April 9–Sept. 5, 2027.
“Mavis Pusey: Restless” is on view at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Claremont, California, through Jan. 3, 2027.
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