Mildred Thompson

Born in 1936 in Jacksonville, FL, Mildred Thompson was an American fine artist whose work spanned four decades and a variety of disciplines. She was also a dedicated educator and made important contributions to the disciplines of creative writing and journalism, cinema, music, and digital media during her career.

Thompson earned her BA from Howard University, Washington, DC, in 1957. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME; Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York City; and University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Germany. In 1959, she participated in a residency at Castle of Rocca Sinibalda, Italy, and in 1961 and 1962 was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH. 

While Thompson lived in New York City in the early 1960s, her work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Thompson, however, spent most of the 1960s and 1970s in self-imposed exile in Germany (predominantly Düren and Konzendorf, near Cologne) due to the racial and gender discrimination she faced in the United States. During this time, Thompson taught, traveled, and exhibited widely in Europe, while producing bodies of work in printmaking, painting, and sculpture.

Thompson’s work can be found in the public collections of the American Federation of Arts, Museum of Modern Art, and Brooklyn Museum, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, GA; Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, FL; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and in Germany at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, and Hamburg Museum, among others. 

Thompson's work was presented in solo exhibitions at venues including as the Goethe-Zentrum and Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, GA; Howard University; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Auburn University, AL; Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, FL; and Brenau College, Gainesville, GA, as well as the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, and Hochschule für Kunst and Design, Halle, Germany. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; and was featured in the traveling exhibition Forever Free: Art by African-American Women 1862-1980 in the early 1980s. Thompson participated in the 1992 Dakar Biennale, Senegal. Posthumously, her work was included in the 2018 Berlin Biennial and presented in solo exhibitions at New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, in 2018 and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, in 2019.
_{—Adapted and excerpted from https://mildredthompson.org/bio.html, accessed 12-15-2021}