Biography
Mildred Thompson studied at Howard University (Washington, D.C.) under the tutelage of James A. Porter, a pioneering African American art historian, and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1957.
In 2016, her solo exhibition, “Mildred Thompson: Resonance, Selected Works from the 1990s”, was held at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (Georgia). Her work was featured in the 2017 group exhibition, “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today”, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.); the exhibition later travelled to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, Missouri). In 2025, the MNAM – Centre Pompidou acquired a large painting by Thompson, which featured in the exhibition “Paris noir”. An exhibition entitled “Mildred Thompson: Frequencies” opened at ICA Miami in 2025.
Thompson’s work is present in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art; the Mott-Warsh Collection in Flint, Michigan.
