Mavis Pusey Jamaican American, 1928-2019
Mavis Pusey was born in Retreat, Jamaica in 1928 and moved to New York City at the age of 18 to study fashion design at the Traphagen School of Fashion. She later enrolled in courses at the Art Students League of New York, where she earned a Ford Foundation scholarship and studied under artists such as Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. Following her studies at the Art Students League, Pusey moved to London and worked as a pattern maker for the Singer Corporation and had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1968 before returning to NYC in 1969, where she began printmaking with Robert Blackburn.
In 1971, Pusey was featured in a group exhibition at the Whitney entitled Contemporary Black Artists in America. In addition to her own art-making, Pusey taught at The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Rutgers University. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Her works are abstract, geometric, and non-representational, in conversation with the sociopolitical context in which she was working, but remaining true to her own practice.
