At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.

Until recently, the vast and significant contributions Black artists have made to the history of abstraction have been under-recognized by the mainstream art world. If artists like Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, and Howardena Pindell are finally getting their due, thanks to big museum shows and representation at the world’s top galleries, many Black female abstractionists who began their careers in the mid-20th century such as Betty Blayton, EJ Montgomery, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Barbara Chase-Riboud are still awaiting such visibility.

But there have been some attempts to elevate these artists. One came in Adrienne Edward’s 2015 essay “Blackness in Abstraction” for Art in America, which became an exhibition at Pace Gallery the following year, and another in the 2017 traveling exhibition “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today.” Curated by Erin Dziedzic and Melissa Messina for the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, the show focused on the art-historical contributions of women artists of color and took its name from a series of works by Mildred Thompson from the ’90s.

Thompson’s wide-ranging oeuvre spans painting and sculpture, printmaking, musical compositions, wood works, and more. All of the late artist’s work was guided by a “natural curiosity and feeling of wanting to discover something,” Messina told ARTnews in a recent interview. “It’s bringing you into worlds that you’ve never seen before—things that are invisible to the naked eye.”

It’s only in the years since the “Magnetic Fields” exhibition that Thompson’s art has begun to be shown with relative frequency. Her estate is now represented by New York’s Galerie Lelong & Co., which has mounted two solo shows dedicated to work by Thompson, who died of cancer in 2003. Major institutions in the South such as the SCAD Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art have showcased her work, and Thompson’s paintings were included in the acclaimed 2018 Berlin Biennale. In 2021, her art appeared in the exhibition “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver.

Messina, who is curator of Thompson’s estate and a former student of the artist, said that Thompson was ahead of her time—which is why her work is hard to classify. “She wouldn’t be put in a box,” Messina said. “She wouldn’t stick to one thing. She was always letting the idea let her lead her to the best medium for that idea.”

Early Career

Born in 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida, Thompson was was a precocious child growing up, always curious about how things worked. She once took apart a bicycle and then put it back together, to learn more about its construction. In the mid-1950s, she left Florida to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she got her first formal training in art making in the school’s legendary art department, which had produced other luminary artists like Alma Thomas and Loïs Mailou Jones. One of her mentors at Howard was the department’s chair, James A. Porter, who helped arrange for her to receive a scholarship for a summer study at the Skowhegan School in Maine.

After graduating from Howard in 1957, she received a Max Beckmann Scholarship to study at the Brooklyn Museum School in New York. While there, she learned about the Fulbright Program and decided that she wanted to live abroad to further her artistic education. When she didn’t receive a Fulbright, Thompson, who felt she was more than qualified, was nevertheless undeterred. “I decided to go to Europe on my own,” she wrote in a 1977 essay about her career for Black Art: An International Quarterly. “Anyone could buy a boat ticket. I could pay my own way somehow—I was determined to go.”

Thompson saved up money to sail to Europe through a summer teaching job at Florida A&M University Tallahassee. She had recently met artist and art historian Samella Lewis, who was the school’s art department chair and would become a lifelong friend and mentor to Thompson. Though she initially thought she might travel to Paris, Thompson’s other mentor, Porter, encouraged her to consider West Germany, given the parallels he saw between Expressionist art of the 1910s and ’20s and her early paintings.

Though she initially had trouble adjusting to Hamburg, Thompson eventually enrolled in the city’s Hochschule für bildende Künst, where she was encouraged to continue making her abstractions. She soon had her first solo show in 1960 at a Hamburg gallery, and several of the works sold. The exhibition later led to a summer residency at a castle in Italy, sponsored by American arts patron Caresse Crosby.

From West Germany to New York and Back Again

In 1961, Thompson decided she had learned as much as she could at Hamburg’s Hochschule and returned to New York. She was quickly able to sell two prints to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and two prints and a drawing to the Brooklyn Museum, but she could not find a commercial art gallery that would represent her. (Such was the case for many women and Black artists of the era.) In her Black Art essay, Thompson recalled that one art dealer “said—being helpful—that it would be better if I had a white friend to take my work around, someone to pass as Mildred Thompson.”

Though Thompson’s New York stay was been difficult for the artist emotionally and mentally, it ended up spurring a body of work that she would continue for the rest of her career. Inspiration struck in the form of slats and repurposed vegetable crates that she found in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood, where she was living at the time. “She was looking around at any materials that she could use that really struck her,” Messina said.

She stayed in New York for two more years and spent both summers at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. But by 1963, Thompson decided she had had enough of New York and returned to West Germany. She eventually settled in the town of Düren, not far from Cologne, and stayed for some 13 years. As Lowery Stokes Sims wrote in an essay for a 2018 Galerie Lelong & Co. show, “Thompson’s wanderlust was not merely one of personal predilection; her decision to spend extended periods in Europe was made partly in response to the discouragement and discrimination she faced while trying to establish her career in New York City.”

In West Germany, Thompson was able to set up a studio, and she dedicated herself to perfecting her use of wood. These elegant pieces bridge the gap between painting and sculpture. In one from 1972 (now in NOMA’s collection), Thompson displays the beauty of the light wood grain in nearly even and symmetrical vertical strips, until that harmony is interrupted by a sharp purple triangle. “You see an intuition turn into real craftsmanship,” Messina said.

Scientific and Cosmological Inspirations

In addition to her work in wood, Thompson was equally dedicated to making oil paintings, works on paper, and etchings. For these works she drew on an even wider set of references, including the work of artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, Theosophy (a religion whose followers included Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian), music, and science—in particular, physics. Hers became a practice that was dedicated to making the invisible visible. “At the root of all of her ideas was this universal resonance and these patterns that we all see in ourselves and in the world around us,” Messina said. “She felt like that connectivity is what made us all sort of beings on a planet together.”

After years spent in West Germany, Thompson moved back to the United States in 1974, when she became artist-in-residence for Tampa Bay-Hillsborough County. Then, in 1977, she moved back to D.C. for a residency at Howard. Thompson stayed in D.C. until 1985, but beginning in 1981, she was also splitting her time between the U.S. capital and Paris. In her 1977 Black Art essay, Thompson said she was convinced to return to the United States because people were telling her how much it had changed. In it she seems hopeful: “America HAS changed. I am ready now for America and am eager to see if America is really ready for me.”

It was in Paris that Thompson began to paint abstract canvases, beginning with her 1980s series “Rebirth of Life.” In these modestly sized canvases, thick layers of paint form complex abstract shapes in bright colors. In one from 1983, a mostly yellow background is filled with dots of pink, sky blue, and green, and contorting shapes appear in red and orange tones. The effect is one of a composition pulsing with life.

Vibrating Colors

Around 1986, Thompson decided that she would end her years-long self-imposed exile in Europe and live in the U.S. permanently. She settled in Atlanta, where she taught at Spelman College, Agnes Scott College, and the Atlanta College of Art (now part of the Savannah College of Art and Design). In addition to the generations of students she taught, for over a decade beginning in the late 1980s, Thompson was also an associate editor for Art Papers magazine, where she interviewed artists like Emma Amos, Valerie Maynard, Loïs Mailou Jones, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Meredith Monk.

In a large studio with 20-foot-tall ceilings, Thompson was now able to create art on a much larger scale. The paintings she made in Atlanta were informed by color theory—she juxtaposed contrasting and complementary hues with each other to ensure that the canvases popped. In her famed “Magnetic Fields” series (1990), Thompson considered the theory that magnetic waves were yellow when seen on an ultraviolet scale. In these paintings, large expanses of yellow become host to radiating spirals of reds and turquoise. Meanwhile, with her contemporaneous “Radiation Exploration” series (1994), blue dominates, in homage to the color that radiation waves emit when seen on an ultraviolet scale.

“She wanted the work to be joyful and energetic,” Messina said. “She understood how we as humans stand before a large-scale painting and feel color—the way it vibrates, the way we internalize it…. You’re having a physiological response when you’re looking at her paintings, as well as a psychological one.”

‘Everything I Touch Will Be Part Black and Female’

Though Thompson dedicated herself to abstraction for much of her career, she experimented with figuration, most notably in the illustrations that accompanied Audre Lorde’s poems for a collaborative sketchbook titled Journey Stones: Love Poems. (Lorde and Thompson were romantically involved at the time, and Thompson’s drawings for this series, which date to ca. 1977–78, were included in the acclaimed traveling 2019 exhibition “Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989.”) In these sketches, Thompson tenderly depicts the love between Black lesbians, who are shown in the nude, hugging and caressing each other.

Her abstractions stand apart from these works because they don’t appear overtly political—and Thompson faced adversity for this. Thompson countered those arguments frequently in essays she wrote, suggesting that her identity was intimately connected to her art, no matter what its subject was. In one catalogue essay from 1980, written shortly after she had abandoned figuration, she said, “With art, there are symbolic things that have to be learned to make work universal … you can’t limit who you communicate with. … But (first) you have to know yourself. Everything I touch will be part Black and female—all my success and the things I have gotten are part of that.”

Berlin—the philosopher, not the city—is this Biennale’s guiding spirit. While the curatorial team’s mission statement for the 10th Berlin Biennale says that the 46 exhibiting artists do not “provide a coherent reading of histories or the present,” the strongest works do something arguably more significant: They draw attention to the dangers of coherent narratives. Like Isaiah Berlin’s thesis on liberty, the most meaningful works ask what we, as individuals and as societies, want and will tolerate from authority, each other, and ourselves as citizens—and urge us to be cautious about letting righteousness guide our actions or conclusions.

“We Don’t Need Another Hero,” the Biennale’s title, is borrowed from Tina Turner’s 1985 theme song for the dystopian sci-fi blockbuster Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, but here it becomes a direct response to Mario Pfeifer’s gripping two-channel installation, Again/Noch einmal (2018), shown at the Akademie der Künste. Commissioned by the Biennale, Pfeifer collaborated with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, German state-funded television, to produce a chillingly professional combination of crime television tropes, dramatic reenactments, Brechtian alienation techniques, and documentary footage, all put toward recounting the death of a 21-year-old, mentally ill Iraqi man in Arnsdorf, Saxony, near Dresden. During the Biennale’s opening days, viewers of the piece were visibly shaken; some cried.

The subject of Again/Noch einmal, whom Pfeifer identifies as Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz, entered a Netto supermarket in May 2016, to complain that he could not activate the phone card he’d purchased there the previous day. He did not speak German and couldn’t communicate with the cashier. He was in Germany seeking psychiatric care he could not receive in Iraq. He grabbed a wine bottle and started shouting at the cashier in frustration, and in that moment, four massive men in black appeared, beat the slim young man, and removed him from the store. They zip-tied him to a tree and the police later arrived and took him to the local psychiatric hospital, where he was a patient. The four men were discharged at the scene.

None of this would have been accessible to the world were it not for a video made inside the store by a bystander. It went viral in Germany on YouTube and other forums, and garnered passionate support for the four Germans, who were identified as part of a “neighborhood watch” group. Right-wing groups circulated the footage, coupled with hate-filled messages against refugees and asylum seekers. Netto management denied that the men had been summoned, and denounced vigilantism, but the men faced a sympathetic court that did not watch the video, and freed them without bail. A week before their court date, the Iraqi man was found dead—frozen in the woods—after he apparently wandered away from the psychiatric unit; the employees had not searched for him.

The overall mood of Again/Noch einmal is profound sadness coupled with rising suspense. Pfeifer uses cool blues and noirish crime-show lighting in restaging the scene and interviewing actors playing the local townspeople and jury. A silent, faceless figure in a green bodysuit—standing in for the anonymous civilian who documented the events—shows us the actual footage filmed in the Netto. The dialogue is primarily in German, but one giant screen uses English subtitles, and another, Arabic.

Pfeifer does not make the situation and the profound questions it poses easy. Schabas Saleh Al-Aziz is played by a burly actor in a cool, pristine tracksuit, striking a far more threatening figure than the fragile man in the viral video. The highly stylized scene in which he is tied to a tree is a riff on the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Kamran Sadeghi’s accompanying score supplies Hitchcock-level suspense. The entire drama is moderated by Dennenesch Zoudé, the first Afro-German actress to star in the immensely popular TV detective drama Polizeiruf 110, and Mark Waschke, a handsome German actor best known for playing a detective in Tatort, Germany’s answer to Law and Order.

At one point, Zoudé looks into the screen and asks us viewers whether what we’ve witnessed is “vigilante justice or civilian courage,” referencing the German phrase used to remind citizens always to question authority and maintain their autonomous morality by fighting for the vulnerable. “Civilian courage” was the phrase callously appropriated by the far-right AfD party in Germany after this case to reframe anti-immigration sentiments as self-defense. In this brutal context, the biennale’s curators deploy their title and the Socratic method to take a clear stand against the “heroes” of the German anti-refugee right.

The tensions that Pfeifer explores (and evokes) are a running theme throughout the Biennale. Many of the works presented in five of the venues feel slight and frail—which is understandable in a world where powerful and urgent statements in the press, protest signs, and private debates overshadow art’s potential function as our symbolic consciousness. The connection between artworks originating across decades and continents is hazy, but many provoke an all-too-familiar feeling of shakiness, verging on helplessness. In today’s woke world, most of the works merely reinforce the viewers’ omnipresent anxieties, not so much contributing new insights, but rather representing our period of relentless global unrest and outrage.

Ceramic and metal sculptures of medical instruments by the German artist Julia Phillips, for instance, are disturbing set pieces that illustrate pressing concerns about physical safety, bodily vulnerability, and mistrust of authorities. The worn found fabrics in Nicaraguan artist Patricia Belli’s soft sculptures from the late 1990s elicit a similar feeling of queasy empathy. Equally unsettling are the tumorlike lumps of corn and clay by Oscar Murillo, which the Colombian artist scattered throughout the Akademie der Künste, stuffing them in natural fabric sheaths and sewing international coins along the seams where these massive forms appear to burst open, spilling their guts.

At Kunst-Werke Institute (KW) for Contemporary Art, a shrill wail permeates the main building where interactive performance, dance, sculpture, film, and installations are shown. Emanating from Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s choreographed homage to eastern Nigerian women’s political protests, it complicates Mildred Thompson’s serene abstract found wood assemblages from the late 1960s.

Sound, specifically music, serves a very different function in KW’s basement, where Fabiana Faleiros (aka Lady Incentivo) staged her Mastur Bar (2015–18), an ode to female masturbation. An earworm rendition of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” accompanies fabric sculptures of spread fingers and labia in the Brazilian artist’s welcomingly pleasure-positive installation. As part of a traveling show that includes workshops, lectures, and a performance in which participants escape oppression by expressing sexuality, Mastur Bar does not advocate solipsistic hedonism but instead celebrates the-personal-is-political, a fundamental feminist trope, by turning female pleasure into an act of self-determination.

Faleiros’s work represented a rare moment of playfulness in the Biennale, one that was more than counterbalanced by Dineo Seshee Bopape’s devastating installation Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings], 2016–17, one of most painful pieces on view. Comprising construction rubble, video screens (one showing Nina Simone’s 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland), and yellow-orange light, it represented the epidemic of sexual violence in South Africa by turning KW’s entire subterranean exhibition space into scorched earth. Meanwhile, at the Akademie der Künste, Firelei Báez’s magnificently disarming installations and her haunting gouache and graphite drawings explored intersections between Haitian and German history, combining sculpture and stagecraft to create uncanny replicas of opulent interiors and architectural ruins, accompanied by documentation combining fiction, myth, and history. Báez’s retellings are simultaneously nightmarish and seductive.

Describing Luke Willis Thompson’s series of gold urinals mounted at a height appropriate for water-fountains, Tavia Nyong’o, critic and professor of African-American Studies at Yale, writes in the biennale’s catalogue, “To enter the mind of Thompson’s work is to realize this: We can’t breathe. We must breathe. Together.” This statement rings true of the biennale as a whole. The curators have tapped into today’s tensions and anxieties, and suggest that we as citizens must remember what it means to be courageous.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 129 under the title “Berlin Biennale.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21

Opening: Camae Ayewa/Moor Mother at the Kitchen
“How do we learn from our past, to envision the future we want?” In answer to that question, which she once asked an interviewer, Camae Ayewa, a.k.a. Moor Mother, has been producing a style of experimental music that attempts to recover “a pre-modern black identity.” Characterized by terms like “hardcore poetry,” “slaveship punk,” and “power electronics,” Ayewa’s work looks at the ways in which identity and history are constantly entangled. With this show, which is held on the occasion of Ayewa winning the Kitchen’s new $20,000 Emerging Artist Award, she will debut new work and performances.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22

Opening: Milton Resnick at Cheim & Read
This April, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation will open in a former synagogue in the Lower East Side. But before that organization opens to the public, have a preview of Resnick’s work with this exhibition of a series by the painter from the early 1980s. All of the works were made on corrugated boards and took months to make; they resemble canvases that have slicked with paint, burned, and otherwise distressed. For Resnick, who first became famous during the Abstract Expressionist movement, the works were ways of making painting look like dirtied streets—they better reflected everyday life.
Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Stan Douglas at David Zwirner
For his newest show at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, Stan Douglas will show work from two series: DCT and Blackout. The first (borrowing the name for the tech term for “discrete cosine transform”) comprises abstract images made by way of distorting JPEG files, and the latter features staged photographs shot by Douglas in high-dramatic fashion to evoke an imaginary blackout in New York City.
David Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street, 6-8 p.m.

Exhibition: Mildred Thompson at Galerie Lelong & Co.
“Radiation Explorations and Magnetic Fields” will be the first solo exhibition for Mildred Thompson in New York. During the span of her 40-year career, Thompson drew inspiration from philosophy, mathematics, music, and science, translating ideas of magnetic energy and spatial relationships into bright, saturated linear and circular forms. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936, Thompson left for Germany in the ’60s amid racism and sexism in the United States; there, she exhibited more widely. Today, almost 15 years after her death, she is formally represented in the States for the first time.
528 West 26th Street, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23

Opening: Rachel Lee Hovnanian at Leila Heller Gallery
The first of a three-part exhibition by Rachel Lee Hovnanian titled “The Women’s Trilogy Project, NDD Immersion Room” is a large-scale immersive environment in which gallery-goers must trade in their phones for a lantern to enter. The dimly lit space—a forest that lacks the many marks of human civilization—challenges viewers to evaluate their relationships with technology. The installment’s title refers to Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD), describing a state of human alienation from nature that results in worsened moods and a reduced attention span. Hovnanian’s work asks the viewer to confront the cultural pressures and societal dependencies that affect our relationships with one another.
Leila Heller Gallery, 568 West 25th Street, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Cosima von Bonin at Petzel
Cosima von Bonin’s conceptual sculpture and installation work has long investigated social relationships using a touch of humor. Her exhibition “What if it Barks?,” Von Bonin’s eighth show at Petzel, incorporates a marine motif reminiscent of her 2016 show “Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?” The exhibition will feature her signature cloth paintings and an oversize can of cat food suspended from the ceiling.
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Shuta Hasunuma at Pioneer Works
The video Walking Score in Red Hook was created by the Japanese sound artist Shuta Hasunuma during his 2017 residency at Pioneer Works. In the piece, the artist walks through the aforementioned Brooklyn neighborhood while a microphone trails him, dragging on the ground. This exhibition features work from Hasunuma’s residency alongside pieces crafted in his homeland. Many synthesize the sonic and the sculptural, and some–like 2018’s STUDIES, which features objects that sit in a space between musical instruments and something else entirely–are interactive. After the reception, Hasunuma will perform live with the Japanese tabla player U-zhaan; the duo has a forthcoming collaborative record to be released in the spring.
Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 7-9 p.m.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24

Talk: Torkwase Dyson at the Drawing Center
The Drawing Center’s new annual initiative Winter Term sees the institution partnering with an artist or organization in an exploration of drawing’s role in political engagement. For the project’s debut session, the artist Torkwase Dyson has organized a two-week program of classics and discussions stemming from her larger project known as the Wynter-Wells Drawing School for Environment Justice. To kick things off, there will be a conversation between Dyson and the writer and professor Christina Sharpe on the exhibition’s first day.
Drawing Center, 35 Wooster, 6 p.m.

Opening: Milton Avery at Yares Art
For “Milton Avery: Early Works on Paper and Late Paintings,” Yares Art has focused on the bookends of the artist’s distinguished career. More than 20 large-scale oil paintings will be on view alongside 50 never-before-exhibited works from the 1930s, which show the artist working in watercolor and gouache on paper. Classic Avery seascapes like Rolling Surf from 1958 sit next to more seminal works, charting the artist’s maturation over the decades.
Yares Art, 745 Fifth Avenue, 6-8 p.m.