Mildred Thompson — À propos — Slash Paris

Mildred Thompson was born in 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida, and died in 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Washington, DC in 1957, under the tutelage and mentorship of the pioneering African American art historian James A. Porter. Recently her work has been included in significant group exhibitions including “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today”, which travelled from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse”, which traveled from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado; and “Doro Olowu: Seeing Chicago” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. In 2019, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art presented a solo exhibition of her work entitled “Mildred Thompson: The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003”. In 2018, her “Wood Pictures” were featured in a solo presentation, “Mildred Thompson: Against the Grain”, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale. Thompson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge Massachusetts; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among other institutions.