Threaded Tensions: Chakaia Booker, Raque Ford, Tomashi Jackson, and Mavis Pusey: Selections from Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

In anticipation of Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson at the MFA Boston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, LaiSun Keane is pleased to welcome the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), the longest-running community printshop in the U.S. While the Blackburn Print Archive documents Wilson’s frequent collaborations with RBPMW, it is less widely known that Robert Blackburn was Wilson’s best man at his wedding.

Blackburn pioneered experimentation in color lithography, once using up to 17 colors with multiple stones. Many of his works exist as unique variations rather than traditional editions, with subtle shifts in color and composition. Threaded Tensions reflects Blackburn’s ethos of experimentation, featuring artists rooted in textiles and printmaking.

Mavis Pusey (1928 - 2019) arrived at the Workshop by way of Jamaica, the homeland of Robert Blackburn’s parents. Initially trained in fashion—sewing was a common skill of women of her generation—she ultimately pursued painting and printmaking at The Art Students League under Blackburn’s mentor, Will Barnet. After working in Europe at Atelier 17, she returned to New York and became involved with RBPMW. Her compositions often reference urban life through abstraction from dilapidated architecture, invented mechanical gears, and musical notations.

Like Pusey, Raque Ford initially pursued fashion before shifting her focus to fine art. Music and pop culture deeply influence her work—evident in her large-scale installations of dance floors and fan fiction. Ford’s printmaking process transforms plexiglass into ready-made matrices for monotypes, combining drypoint, chine-collé, and layered text. Her work frequently incorporates personal history, such as references to names of segregated cemeteries –”Hollywood” and “Friendship”– in her mother’s Arkansas hometown. She also blurs digital and analog spaces, integrating robotic text, such as automated messages that read, Reply ‘STOP’ to stop.

Tomashi Jackson combines practices of painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure and policy. Considering color as both chromatic and social, her work embraces compositional abstraction to investigate the interaction of color and its impact on the perceived value of human life in public space. The works presented are two framed color portraits, one of Nia K. Evans from the 2022 body of work titled "The Great Society" and the other of Michi Meko from the 2017 body of work titled "Interstate Lovesong".

Chakaia Booker’s engagement with textiles informs both her sculptural and printmaking practices. While living in New York’s East Village, she salvaged her first tire from a burnt-out car, setting the foundation for her signature sculptural style.

Much like piecing together fabric, Booker assembles discarded tires into intricate, abstract forms. This instinctive process extends into her printmaking, where she slices, layers, and collages reliefs, lithographs, and chine-collé works, introducing gesture and improvisation. Her tradition of abstraction was influenced by her teacher, Al Loving and others such as Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards and Martin Puryeur.