Modernism and Black History Month

Opening Image: Howardena Pindell’, ”Autobiography- India (Shiva, Ganges),” 1985

White Space founder, Khadijah Fulton at the U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022.

Simone Leigh's pavilion at Venice in 2022 marked the first time a Black woman represented the United States with a solo presentation. The work was monumental and tender at the same time, centering Black women’s forms through ceramic, bronze, and video.

I did not learn about Black artists working in modernism or abstraction, especially women, until well after design school at Parsons. When I finally encountered their work, it felt like both a discovery and a deep recognition. A reminder that the creative history of artists and designers of color is broader and more complex than what many of us were shown in classrooms and survey books.

These are a few of the women who defied expectations and stereotypes, following an inner compass that did not always fit what the art world expected of them. Their work continues to shape my own instincts toward beauty, form, and creative expression.

Alma Thomas, Snoopy Sees a Sunrise, 1970

Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas is often described as a painter of mosaics of color. Arcs, stripes, and shifting fields of light and movement that seem simple at first glance, then slowly reveal how considered they really are. Her 1972 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art made her the first Black woman to have a solo show there, a milestone that came when she was already in her eighties. 

Thomas spent much of her life teaching in Washington, D.C., and did not fully step into her mature abstract style until later in her career. Her canvases from the 1960s and 70s are built from short, tessellated brushstrokes that read like hand-cut tiles. Many of them were inspired by the view from her front window, by gardens, and by the moon landings, yet they dissolve those references into rhythm and color.

Alma Thomas, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music, 1976

There is something quietly radical about that. In a time when Black artists were often expected to work in overtly figurative or narrative ways, Thomas insisted on the freedom to explore pure abstraction, and to let joy and color stand on their own terms. Her work continues to teach me how restraint can feel expansive, and how repetition can become a kind of visual breathing.

Winifred Mason Chenet

Before contemporary jewelry brands and studio practices became common, Winifred Mason Chenet was running her own jewelry studio in New York City in the 1940s. She is widely believed to be the first commercial Black jeweler in the United States.

Working primarily in copper and brass, Mason drew from West Indian and Haitian cultural traditions, creating sculptural forms that folded spiritual references and folk motifs into wearable pieces. She opened a studio in Greenwich Village, sold work through department stores like Lord and Taylor, and counted Billie Holiday among her clients.

Later, under her married name in Haiti, she developed and sold work that responded even more directly to Caribbean visual language. Many of her pieces were one of a kind, made with tools she fabricated herself when the right ones did not exist. After returning to New York City, she also employed and mentored younger jewelers, one of which was Art Smith, who would go on to open his own influential studio and become one of the most recognized Black modernist jewelers. 

Her story is another reminder that what we now call “modernism” did not emerge only from European studios or big institutions. It grew from hands at work in small workshops, from Caribbean and African design languages, and from women who claimed space for their own ideas in metal, long before history was ready to fully acknowledge them.

L to R: Loretta Pettway-Blocks and Strips-Courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation; Work-Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion of Strips by Annie Mae Young c. 1976, Collection of the Tinwood Alliance; Medallion, Loretta Pettway, c. 1960, Original Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

The Quilters of Gee's Bend

The quilters of Gee's Bend quilters come from a small, rural community in Alabama held within a deep bend of the Alabama River. For generations, women there have pieced quilts that were first meant to keep families warm in uninsulated homes, then later recognized as some of the most important works of American abstraction.

Their compositions are built from salvaged cloth, work clothes, and scraps, assembled into bold geometry, irregular grids, and off-center frames. Patterns like Housetop or Bricklayer repeat, but never quite the same way twice. Each maker brings her own improvisation to the structure, and the layers of meaning imbued by the often personal nature of the fabrics bring emotional resonance to pieces whose bold visuals already speak aesthetic volumes. 

The Gee’s Bend Quilters. Courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

In 2002-2006, the exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend traveled to major museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is where I encountered the work. I'll never forget walking through that exhibition.

What moves me about these quilts is the way function, feeling and experimentation live together. These pieces were made for beds, yet they carry a visual and emotional language that feels as adventurous as any painting. They remind me that abstraction can grow from necessity, from community, and from hands that are not interested in categories at all.

Howardena Pindell, Photograph by Gwendolyn Coady

Howardena Pindell

If Alma Thomas and the Gee’s Bend quilters show how far abstraction can go within a single medium, Howardena Pindell shows how a single artist can stretch abstraction across many mediums and decades.

Her early works layer punched paper circles, grids, and sprayed paint into ordered yet deeply human systems. She began cutting canvases into sections, sewing them back together, and building surfaces out of thousands of paper dots, sequins, and bits of card. There is a sense of counting, of tracking time, embedded in those surfaces.

Howardena Pindell, Untitled #50, 2010

At the same time, Pindell’s practice has never stayed confined to painting. She is also a curator and educator, and one of the founders of A.I.R. Gallery, the first artist-directed gallery for women in the United States. Her body of work includes collage, drawing, film, “video drawings,” and mixed media pieces that treat data, memory, and politics as material. 

Across five decades, Pindell has kept moving between subtle, almost atmospheric abstractions and works that explicitly name systems of power. Her practice holds all of it at once: beauty, structure, autobiography, statistics, rage, and repair. That range is what I find important to honor here. It is a reminder that artists, especially Black women, do not have to choose between rigor and feeling, or between formal language and political clarity.

Mavis Pusey with her work Within Manhattan, Courtesy Studio Museum of Harlem

Mavis Pusey

Mavis Pusey was a Jamaican-born abstract painter and printmaker who translated the noise and motion of the modern city into hard-edge geometry. She studied fashion and later art in New York, eventually developing a style that used sharp planes of color to echo cranes, scaffolding, and demolition sites.

Her compositions look rigorously planned, but they are rooted in observation. Pusey watched how cities changed, how buildings went up and came down, and turned that constant construction into layered forms that feel both architectural and musical. At a time when Black artists were often pushed toward narrative work about identity or protest, she insisted on the validity of nonrepresentational abstraction as a language of its own.

Mavis Pusey, 'Untitled', 1965

Pusey’s name still does not appear as often as it should when people talk about abstract art of the twentieth century, but she did recieve an expansive retrospective just in 2025 at The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania–ICA Philadelphia. Her canvases and prints hold a calm intensity that feels deeply contemporary. They remind me that structure and emotion do not cancel each other out. They meet in the edges and intervals.

A Closing Note

These women shaped modernism in ways that were not always acknowledged in their own time. Some worked within institutions, some far outside of them. Some found recognition late in life. Others are still having their contributions fully named.

What connects them for me is not only their place in art history, but the way they point toward a different kind of lineage. One where Black women’s experimentation in color, form, material, and structure is understood as central, not peripheral. One where quilts, jewelry, paintings, and video can all be part of the same conversation.

Sharing their work here feels like a small way to honor that history, and to remember that there are many ways to build a visual language. Some of those ways look like sculpture on a global stage. Some look like a quilt spread across a bed in a small town. All of them remind me why I do what I do in the studio, and how much wider the story really is.