Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling at Galerie Lelong

Mildred Thompson (1936–2003) was an American artist who used abstraction to picture the invisible forces and dimensions that shape the universe. For many years early in her career she moved between the United States, France, and Germany in search of opportunities. In 1986 she settled in Atlanta as artist-in-residence at Spelman College and later taught at Atlanta College of Art. Cosmos Calling is the third Thompson exhibition at Galerie Lelong.

The core of the show is the Music of the Spheres series. Atlanta gave Thompson stability and a dedicated studio near her home, which let her work at a new scale. Each painting in the series is a triptych about eight feet tall and twelve feet wide, devoted to one planet of the solar system, and they are the largest works she made. Music of the Spheres: Mercury (1996, oil on board) measures 96 by 144 inches.

Each painting has a companion sound piece. Thompson composed the electronic music herself, drawing on the NASA Voyager recordings and using electronics, toy instruments, and found objects. She tied each planet to an emotional atmosphere: communication and contentment for Mercury, vitality and beauty for Venus, optimism and enthusiasm for Jupiter, and passion and violent change for Mars. She assigned colors to different invisible forces and phenomena, and the series is meant as a spiritual and sensory journey through space.

A group of paintings from the Heliocentric Series follows the movement of the same planets. These abstract works are built from spiraling ovoid forms in magenta and pink, cut through by bands of cobalt blue that add motion. They describe the ongoing balance between gravitational pull and inertia that keeps planets in orbit. Works include Untitled (Heliocentric Series), c. 1993–94, oil on vinyl, and Crescendo III from 1988. Works on paper and ephemera from her Atlanta years add context.

This is the first time the paintings and their electronic compositions have been shown publicly in New York. An opening reception takes place on Thursday, October 29, from 6 to 8 pm. A meditation session is scheduled for October 30 and a panel discussion for October 31. Thompson's work is also on view in Hard Art at MoMA PS1 and in Along the Color Line – Traces of a Transatlantic Modernism at Museum Ludwig in Cologne.