| Intro | Jamaican-American artist |
| A.K.A. | Mavis Iona Pusey |
| Was |
Artist Painter Printmaker |
| From |
United States of America |
| Type |
Arts Business |
| Gender | female |
| Birth | 1928, Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica |
| Death |
20 April 2019, Falmouth, United States of America (aged 91 years) |
Mavis Iona Pusey (September 17, 1928 – April 20, 2019) was a Jamaican-born American abstract artist.
Early life and education
Pusey was born on September 17, 1928, in Retreat, Jamaica, to parents who died when she was young. From the age of nine, she learned to sew and make dresses from her aunt with whom she lived. Her first job was at a clothing factory in Kingston.
When she was 18 years old, she enrolled at Traphagen School of Fashion in New York. She later transferred to Art Students League of New York, which allowed her the time to work at a bridal gown store to support herself financially. She had earned a scholarship from the Ford Foundation and studied under Will Barnet, a painter and printmaker. After four years of study at the League, when her student visa expired, Pusey moved to England to live with her two brothers in London and continued her education.
Career
In 1968, Pusey had her first solo exhibition in Galerie Louis Soulanges in Paris. She returned to the U.S. and her work was featured in a 1971 major group exhibition titled Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the works from the 1971 exhibit, a large-scale painting Dejygea (1970), was among those also included in a 2017 exhibit, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
She was also an instructor at several schools including The New School, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Rutgers University. Pusey moved to Orange, Virginia, in 1988 and began teaching at Woodberry Forest School, an all-boys boarding school.
Pusey’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Cochran Collection in LaGrange, Georgia, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
Personal life and death
By 2011, Pusey was in declining health and under the guardianship of the Orange County Department of Social Services. She died on April 20, 2019, in Falmouth, Virginia, at the age of 90.