Mavis Pusey
Mavis Pusey was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1928. She is known for her abstract paintings of bold shapes and hard edged lines found in architectural spaces. Pusey was a prolific artist who found inspiration in the geometric forms found both in fashion patternmaking and in the printmaking process. During sessions at the Robert Blackburn workshop, Pusey began to develop a body of work revealing the process of urban transformation happening in New York City. She was captivated by the shifts in the urban environment that kept the city suspended in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction.
Throughout her career, Pusey taught at institutions for higher education in New York, Pennsylvania, and was a high school teacher in Virginia. In 2019 at the age of ninty, Pusey passed away after years of declining health. Her legacy lives on through the collections of major cultural institutions across the U.S.
Inspired by the ever-evolving changes in the urban landscape, Pusey presents a familiar scene of demolition and construction in the painting Within Manhattan. Geometric forms resemble architectural building blocks in the process of being assembled or possibly deconstructed. The configuration of shapes in the work allows us to imagine the motion present at the site with scaffolding giving way to discarded boards, positioning us as spectators to change.
Mavis Pusey, Within Manhattan, 1977. Oil on canvas, 73 × 115 in. (185.4 × 292.1 cm). Collection of Neil Lane. © Estate of Mavis Pusey. Photograph by Elon Schoenholz
Activities
How do the acts of repetition and iteration allow us to deeply observe the world around us?
Pusey was an avid printmaker, employing similar forms of abstraction into her paintings. She worked through a process of iteration, creating many versions of one composition through different processes.
Work with students to create observational drawings of the evident changes in their cities or neighborhoods.
Next, working in a different medium such as monotype, ask students to distill their compositions into geometric shapes and forms. Monotype allows you to create an impression on a paper using ink while drawing on the reverse side of the paper. The result is a unique image with painterly qualities. Continue encouraging further medium explorations while distilling compositions to the most essential. Afterwards, engage students in a discussion on how the different mediums supported their choice of compositions. What did they regard as most essential and why?
