Women's History Month

By the time Mildred Thompson settled in Atlanta in 1986, she had already enjoyed years of success as a practicing artist and educator living in Europe. After graduating Howard University, she moved to Germany to study at the Art Institute in Hamburg. She briefly returned to the United States in the early 1960s, but the gender and racial discrimination she experienced in New York galleries compelled her to seek a future elsewhere. She moved back to Germany and lived in self-imposed exile in Düren, where she taught at the Eschweiler Volchoch Schule. Over the next decade, she taught, exhibited and sold her work, and traveled to Africa and southern Europe. 

These etchings, created eight years apart, mark an important period of transition from figural works toward the total abstraction that Thompson favored from 1970 onward. The bottom etching, in which a female figure gestures fiercely away from a dense, uncertain background, was created while Thompson was enrolled at the Art Institute of Hamburg and new to printmaking. The top etching was made in Düren years after her return to Germany. In it, background elements cloak, disrupt, and subsume the figure, who serenely recedes, suggesting Thompson’s forthcoming willingness to dissolve the figure entirely. While the latter demonstrates more control over the medium, both feature markings—triangles, zig zags, or chevrons—that she would later use to symbolize womanhood, life, and the cosmos in her abstract work.  

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Carlos celebrates Thompson, her work, and her impact on the arts in Atlanta. Her paintings, prints, and wood sculptures were exhibited throughout the city during her lifetime and after her death in 2003. She taught at several Atlanta institutions, including Agnes Scott and Atlanta College of Art. An editor for Art Papers and a mentor for many, she could often be found at Daddy D’z BBQ, where she and partner Donna Jackson performed with the band WedoBLUES.