COLOR ON THEIR OWN TERMS

ICA Philadelphia presents Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images, an extensive 2-floor retrospective spanning the prolific Jamaica-born artist’s 50-year career.  Her first major museum survey, Pusey is known for her use of bold geometric forms. She pioneered a nonrepresentational, hard-edge abstract approach to art-making at a time when Black artists were expected to create work explicitly addressing identity and social unrest. Instead, she created rich abstract paintings and works on paper inspired by her wide-ranging interests in fashion, print-making, and the urban environment of the cities she lived in. Demolition and construction were major themes in her work. She produced an entire series, “Broken Construction” (1960s–1990s) exploring ideas of destruction and renewal as a metaphor for societal change.  

On view thru December 7, 2025, the show features more than 60 works – including paintings, drawings, and prints and archival materials that explore the influences that led Pusey to develop her unique visual language through experimentation with geometric abstraction. Tracing her journey from Jamaica to New York, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Virginia, Mobile Images follows the evolution of her work and offers a long-overdue reexamination of her impact on American abstraction and beyond. Seven newly discovered paintings, are on view for the first time alongside key works moving through each period of Pusey’s creative trajectory. 

The show is co-organized with the Studio Museum in Harlem, where it will travel in the spring of 2027.

ICA Miami presents Mildred Thompson: Frequencies, the most comprehensive survey to date, for the defining multi-disciplinary artist. On view thru October 12, 2025, the exhibition showcases Thompson’s practice, through 50 works produced from 1959 to 1999, providing the first complete picture of her wide range of influences. 

A restless innovator, she worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, assemblage, and music, throughout her career. While abstraction was central to her practice, her earliest works also engaged with figuration and architecture. 

She relocated from the U.S. to Germany in the late 1950s in search of greater opportunities after facing racism and sexism in the U.S. After returning to New York for a few years, encounters with the same roadblocks prompted her to return West Germany, where she stayed for over a decade. 

Thompson transformed science, music, and philosophy into bold abstract visions. Her radiant swirls and cosmic patterns - early echoes of Afro-Futurism - imagined worlds beyond the limits of racism and sexism. From her wood constructions of the 1970s to her later paintings inspired by cosmology and quantum physics, Thompson’s work pushes viewers to think about scale, energy, and the mysteries of existence, securing her place as one of abstraction’s most visionary voices.

The Phillips Collection presents Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, the first comprehensive museum retrospective of the artist, activist, and educator’s four-decade career and contributions to 20th-century American art. Browne is known for her distinctive approach to color and form and works that blend deeply personal narratives with sharp social commentary. On view thru September 28, 2025, the show brings together over 60 paintings and works on paper across several key series, recently discovered works and ephemera from her estate. 

Browne maintained a studio in Manhattan’s vibrant SoHo neighborhood from 1968 until her death in 1993. She practiced alongside friends such as Faith Ringgold and Benny Andrews, who shared her commitment to fighting for equal representation of women and artists of color during the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. She was part of the BECC, a group of artist activists that protested the exclusionary practices of New York museums and organized alternative exhibitions and programs to support Black artists. In the 1980s and early 1990s, she split her time between New York and California, teaching at UC Santa Cruz and spending time in the redwood forests. 

While politically engaged, she was opposed to the expectations placed on Black artists. “During the Civil Rights Era, one had to paint Black themes, Black people, Black ideas . . . I didn’t. I was painting my kind of protest,” she said.  Informed by what she described as “emotional landscape(s),” her paintings and prints address the politics of race and gender, respond to her international experiences, and reflect on her love of nature.  MORE.