Pattern Pieces on the Wall, Mavis Pusey’s First Major Survey Opens at the Hammer

Mavis Pusey brought a pattern-maker’s eye to abstraction, and on Sunday the Hammer Museum puts that eye on its walls. Mavis Pusey, Mobile Images, the first major museum survey of the Jamaican-born artist, who lived from 1928 to 2019, opens at the Westwood museum on October 11 and runs through February 28, 2027, The Art Newspaper reported. It gathers more than 60 oil paintings, etchings, silkscreens and drawings in graphite and marker.

A Party Before the Opening

The museum marks the launch on Saturday, October 10, with a free Fall Exhibitions Celebration from 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., The Pride LA reported. The evening opens the galleries after hours, with courtyard music by DJ Shay Elys and food and drinks for sale. Admission is first come, first served, and an RSVP does not guarantee entry if the building reaches capacity. The celebration also honors the abstract painter Huguette Caland, according to The Pride LA, and the Hammer says the museum closes at 2 p.m. that day ahead of the party.

The Search for the Artist

The survey began as a hunt. Nearly a decade ago Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, came across Pusey’s work in an online auction catalogue and encouraged the curator Hallie Ringle to investigate, The Art Newspaper wrote. With little more than a dealer’s website to go on, Ringle located the artist in rural Virginia in 2018, a year before her death, and began tracking down works and papers. The show, curated by Ringle and Kiki Teshome, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2025. For the Hammer, Jessi DiTillio, who curated the Los Angeles presentation, has rearranged its thematic sections into chronological chapters.

Garments as Geometry

Born in Retreat, Jamaica, in 1928, Pusey learned to sew from the aunt who raised her, and moved to New York in 1958 to study fashion design before turning to fine art. “I look at many of her paintings as pattern pieces, deconstructed garments, laid onto a table,” Ringle told The Art Newspaper. “Even when the literal figure disappears, the hint of an elbow, knee or thigh remains.”

After her student visa expired in the mid-1960s she moved to London, worked as a patternmaker and studied printmaking with Birgit Skiöld, then went on to Paris, where the student uprisings of May 1968 inspired a series of turbulent lithographs. Back in New York in 1969, she walked through Chelsea photographing demolitions and new construction. Her 1977 work Within Manhattan presses louvres, two-by-fours, bricks and boarded-up doors against one another. The Hammer points to her Broken Construction series, which runs from the 1960s to the 1990s and uses destruction and renewal as metaphors for societal change.

The exhibition carries a Los Angeles echo. Her 1964 color lithograph Untitled (Abstract Composition) traveled to UCLA in 1966 for The Negro in American Art, and it returns to the university 60 years later. In 1971 her painting Dejygea was chosen for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Contemporary Black Artists in America.

Asked about reading Pusey’s abstraction as a rejection of expectations that Black artists address racial politics through figuration, DiTillio told The Art Newspaper, “Refusal feels like a strong word.” She added, “She was committed to colour, form and abstraction. Her experiences of the world made their way into the work in those distinct and particular ways.”

Practical Details

Mavis Pusey, Mobile Images is at the Hammer Museum in Westwood from October 11 through February 28, 2027. The after-hours Fall Exhibitions Celebration is free on Saturday, October 10, from 8 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.