July 12–December 7, 2025
In an undated note to self, Mavis Pusey (1928–2019) outlined a grammar of desire, with the following penned next to the letter “G”: “I WANT MY MEMORY AND THE ABILITY TO CONCENTRATE FULLY…” Inked in blue all-cap letters with the title “I DESIRE” underlined at the top, this textual reflection is one of many archival trace materials—on show in “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images” at ICA Philadelphia—that invites us into Pusey’s story and practice. Intimations of her desire for memory fill the archival vitrines with textual and visual ephemera, and can be traced through her structuralist grammar around the built environment, pedagogical practice, and fashion design. Over ninety-one artworks make up the first museum survey of the Jamaican-born artist whose conceptual commitment to abstraction is widely represented across a selection of paintings, prints, and works on paper.
Throughout her career, Pusey crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean. She was raised in the rural and mountainous town of Retreat in Jamaica’s Saint Mary parish before migrating to New York in 1958, where she built a life in the fine arts, starting in a fashion program before transferring to the Art Students League of New York, where she developed her practice as a painter and printmaker. Pusey spent time in Paris and London before eventually settling in Virginia. The social and spatial environments of each place are present in her work, and are reflected throughout the exhibition with artworks and personal archival materials representing the various periods, and geographies, of her practice.
While Pusey’s mobility is essential to this survey, the breadth of her visual thought and its curation rewards slow viewing. Structurally, the show offers a thoughtful meditation on what it means to stage a posthumous encounter with an artist and their body of work, which many viewers will be encountering for the first time. Pulling from her professional practice in the fashion industry as a pattern and dress maker, the curators staged a studied focus on her command of patterning as storytelling, which swings between figuration and geometric abstraction. A selection of garments is displayed alongside the oil painting Rivgo (1965), a work that highlights Pusey’s use of geometric forms to reflect the rhythmic vibrations of the human body. Her figures, here, are not merely rendered through patterned fragments, but are compositions striving to express the pulse of inner movements, stillness, even rage. Pusey builds her figures up by layering the sharp edges of angles and rectangles with the bend of circles and curved margins that are ballooned into focus through her formal engagement with a muted and natural color palette. Constructed along the same tonal expression, paintings like Recumbancy (1961) and Dancers (n.d.), also speak to her ongoing inquiry into the transmission of bodily rhythm onto canvas, while Personante (1990) seems to place her figures within space, reflecting an abstraction of the body in physical infrastructures.
Pusey’s work also reflects the technological and fabricated rhythms that shape the built environment. Series like “Construction and Demolition” reflect a material and object study of the urban fabric in flux, as seen in her works Re-Gentrification or Regeneration (1986) and Within Manhattan (1977), which features the towering crumble and fall of building elements, with ghostly white rectangular fragments that can be registered as the architectural relics of the unknown past or unmarked future. Pusey’s archive also provides insight into her personal practice of independent research, wherein she documented the city through film and photography as she walked about the Chelsea neighborhood she once called home. She pulled her engagement with architecture and the decay of urban planning that roared through lower Manhattan during the mid-to-late twentieth century into her art, creating an image archive of her spatial encounters with the building, density, and deconstruction of the urban landscape. Pusey photographed the trucks, street corners, storefronts, building materials, and signage she encountered during walks in the city. Elements of these reference documents are mirrored in the canvas and paper works on view: the print piece Untitled (Builders) 1 (1974) is an example of Pusey interpreting a photograph taken under a bridge near the Hudson River into her own spatial grammar, highlighting a labor scene and the grid-like understructure. Her city works respond to the provocations of hyper-urbanization and the orderly disorder of architectural modernity, pushing us to rethink the boundaries between infrastructure and the self.
Although this exhibition is scheduled to travel, it is very fitting that its public discourse began in Philadelphia, a city to which Pusey held many connections, from her pedagogical practices in art and design instruction at PAFA to her work with printmaking studios in the city. The sonic elements within the show also strike a chord with the Black musical histories on display by artist Xenobia Bailey. As you enter the museum, Bailey’s installation frames the glass facade of the museum building with large-scale funk aesthetic designs that tap into the local resonance of the Sun Ra Arkestra. A similar musical emphasis is present in Pusey’s survey, exploring her close study of musical instruments, through which she expressed spatial and human rhythms. In Frozen Vibration (1968), Paris, Mai –Juin (1968), and Eric (ca. 1968), Pusey appears to tackle the internal sonics of what it means to be alive in a particular place and at a particular time. Both works feature rare elements in her oeuvre: the repetition of musical notes and the abstraction of banjo and guitar instruments that capture the public sonics of the Parisian outdoors in relationship to one’s inner tempo.
The archival vitrines throughout the exhibition provided a wealth of context into Pusey’s thought practice, while also generating a litany of questions about the artist’s pedagogical approaches, theoretical frameworks, and varied art techniques. The narrative will surely evolve as the exhibition journeys to other institutions and comes into the sight lines of more curators. Here, Hallie Ringle, with Kiki Teshome, has presented a survey that is spatially experimental, leaning into the intimations of Pusey’s public mind, curiosities, and tools of witnessing.
