Mildred Jean Thompson (March 12, 1936 – September 1, 2003) was an American artist who worked in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. Critics have related her art to West African textiles and Islamic architecture; they have also cited German Expressionism, music (both American jazz and classical European) and Thompson's readings in astronomy, spiritualism and metaphysics as important artistic influences. She also wrote and was an associate editor for the magazine Art Papers.
Thompson had solo exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut, Agnes Scott College, Howard University, Harvard University, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, and the Leopold Hoesch Museum, Düren and Hochschule für Kunst und Design in Halle, Germany, among others. Posthumously, her work was part of the 2017 exhibition "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction," at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to those at her gallery Galerie Lelong in New York City, there were solo exhibitions of her work at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Berlin Biennale in 2018 and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in 2019.
Early life, education, and career
Mildred Jean Thompson was born on March 12, 1936, in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up there. Her formal art training began in 1953 when she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was mentored under James A. Porter (1905–1970), the head of the school's art department. He arranged for Thompson to receive a scholarship for summer study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. After Thompson received the Bachelor of Arts from Howard in 1957, Porter assisted her in entering the Brooklyn Museum of Art School on a Max Beckmann Scholarship. She began to exhibit, and her work was accepted for the Art U.S.A. ’58 exhibition in Madison Square Garden.
Study in Europe
After being rejected from a Fulbright Scholarship to Europe, Thompson decided to go there on her own. She worked to save money during the rest of the school year and, through the auspices of Samella Lewis (1924–), got a summer job teaching ceramics at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee earning enough for steamship passage to Europe.
Thompson's trip to Germany was attended by good fortune: She had decided to study at the Art Academy of Hamburg (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg) even though, at the time she arrived, she had not yet applied or been accepted. Nor did she have any plans as to where she would live. A few private lessons were all she had to prepare herself for the German language. Nevertheless, armed with pluck, a strong portfolio, and the help of some brand-new German friends, Thompson found a room and was immediately accepted into the academy. There her painting teachers were Walter Arno (1930–) and Emil Schumacher (1912–1999). She learned etching, lithography and other printmaking media from Willem Grimm (1904–1986) and Paul Wunderlich (1927–2010). She also met the printmaker Horst Janssen (1929–1995), who introduced her to Galerie Sander in Hamburg, where Thompson had her first solo exhibition. At the end of her first year she received a scholarship that paid for her living and school expenses.
Career
After three years at the academy, in early 1961, Thompson returned to New York City to begin her professional career in the United States. The social and artistic acceptance she had enjoyed in Europe, however, was not to be found even in that most cosmopolitan of American cities. Thompson soon realized that because she was a black woman, she was refused the shows and gallery representation that she felt her work deserved. In a 1977 autobiographical essay, Thompson wrote that "One woman dealer... said that it would be impossible for me to have a show in New York as an artist. [Another gallery owner said] ...that it would be better if I had a white friend to take my work around, someone to pass as Mildred Thompson." She did, however, gain an audience with William Lieberman, the son of German Expressionist painter Max Liebermann; Lieberman (1923–2005) was an influential curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Two of Thompson's prints were purchased for the collection on his recommendation.