5 days ago
This Groundbreaking Artist Vanished. A Decade of Sleuthing Reveals Her Greatness.
In the prime of her art career, before the money dipped too low and the landlord sold her ramshackle Chelsea loft, Mavis Pusey would roam New York City, gauging its ever-changing condition. It was the 1970s and early 1980s, and there was much that compelled her: the ruin and repair, clearance and construction, the dance of buildings and workers and passers-by.
She sometimes took photographs to remember the forms that she noticed. The round windows like portholes cut into construction fences. The peculiar slant of some boards on a truck bed. A pile of bricks. Two utility workers on a cherry picker, its mechanical arm raised high.
Back in the studio, these references might work themselves into one of her large-scale oil paintings, a drawing in graphite or marker, or an etching, lithograph or silk-screen. They integrated her visual vocabulary — a language of stacked, swirling, tumbling geometric forms, abstract yet abrim with life.
To Pusey, who was born in Retreat, Jamaica, in 1928 and came to New York City in 1958 — first to study fashion design, and then fine art — the urban condition, it seems, was bittersweet but always vital, and her art sought its ambivalent essence.
'I love buildings that are being torn down, though I hate to see them torn down,' she said, in one of her rare art talks for which a transcription or tape survives. 'They have a sadness, they have an excitement about them; you will see sadness and yet you see forms and movement and emotion. And because I like them, I fantasize about what happened inside of them.'
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