Creating Matter: Prints by Mildred Thompson
Saturday, January 17, 2015 - Sunday, May 17, 2015
Coinciding with Emory’s Year of Creation Stories, Creating Matter explores Mildred Thompson’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge, particularly about the cosmos and the creation of the world, and the intersection of human intellect, science, and art. Born in 1936, Thompson trained formally at Howard University and later at the Art Institute of Hamburg, Germany. When she returned to the United States, she was discouraged to find that galleries in New York City were reluctant to display the work of an African American artist. One gallery owner even suggested that Thompson hire a white woman to impersonate her in public. As a result, she returned to Germany, where she enjoyed great success throughout the 1960s. Her work was admired and collected especially in Düren, where she lived and taught at the Eschweiler Volchoch Schule, and in the neighboring cities of Aachen and Cologne. Thompson’s enduring popularity in Germany is attested by a silkscreen commissioned by the German Red Cross in 1990, which can be seen in this exhibition. In 1986, Thompson returned to the U.S., settling in Atlanta, where she became editor of Art Papers and taught at several area institutions. The city would be her home for the rest of her life.
Thompson’s work was heavily influenced by African textiles, American jazz, European classical music, and German Expressionism. She worked at a frenetic pace in a variety of media, including wood sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, filmmaking, and set design. Most of her early work was figural, as in the 1959 etching, Untitled, but by the 1970s she had moved toward total abstraction.
Thompson experimented with a variety of printmaking techniques throughout her career, including etching, lithography, screenprinting, and vitreography, an unusual and arduous process in which the artist engraves, stipples, or etches directly into a glass plate. Though she was a slight woman, barely five feet tall, she is also said to have ripped thin copperplates by hand to enhance the sculptural quality of the resulting print.
The vast majority of prints in this exhibition are mature works from the 1980s onward. These prints are full of movement, intentionally mysterious, and reflect Thompson’s own search to understand the beginnings of the universe and of life on earth, and to visualize things unseen. The prints made at South Africa’s Caversham Press, for example, demonstrate her understanding and visualization of string theory, and inspired a series of large paintings completed in Atlanta.
Her work was also inspired by the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. Later in life, she traced many of the instinctive, repetitive forms in her work back to ancient symbols. Wave motifs, like those seen in the dynamic Wave Function III, represent an active intellect, while the triangular forms that appear in a number of her works signify creativity and the feminine.
The works are drawn primarily from the collection of LaGrange, Georgia residents Wes and Missy Cochran, who had a warm and longstanding relationship with the artist. Thompson died in 2003, leaving behind a large and important body of work that remains relatively unexplored in the United States. Her papers are held here at Emory in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
Thompson’s work was heavily influenced by African textiles, American jazz, European classical music, and German Expressionism. She worked at a frenetic pace in a variety of media, including wood sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, filmmaking, and set design. Most of her early work was figural, as in the 1959 etching, Untitled, but by the 1970s she had moved toward total abstraction.
Thompson experimented with a variety of printmaking techniques throughout her career, including etching, lithography, screenprinting, and vitreography, an unusual and arduous process in which the artist engraves, stipples, or etches directly into a glass plate. Though she was a slight woman, barely five feet tall, she is also said to have ripped thin copperplates by hand to enhance the sculptural quality of the resulting print.
The vast majority of prints in this exhibition are mature works from the 1980s onward. These prints are full of movement, intentionally mysterious, and reflect Thompson’s own search to understand the beginnings of the universe and of life on earth, and to visualize things unseen. The prints made at South Africa’s Caversham Press, for example, demonstrate her understanding and visualization of string theory, and inspired a series of large paintings completed in Atlanta.
Her work was also inspired by the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. Later in life, she traced many of the instinctive, repetitive forms in her work back to ancient symbols. Wave motifs, like those seen in the dynamic Wave Function III, represent an active intellect, while the triangular forms that appear in a number of her works signify creativity and the feminine.
The works are drawn primarily from the collection of LaGrange, Georgia residents Wes and Missy Cochran, who had a warm and longstanding relationship with the artist. Thompson died in 2003, leaving behind a large and important body of work that remains relatively unexplored in the United States. Her papers are held here at Emory in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
