Mavis Pusey was an abstract painter and printmaker who was inspired by Manhattan architecture and the cycle of assembly and destruction in the city. She moved from Kingston, Jamaica to New York City in the 1940s to study at the Art Students League with Will Barnet. In the early 1970s, Pusey worked with master printmaker Robert Blackburn to create many of her abstract compositions inspired by the New York City of that decade. Pusey taught at several institutions, including Rutgers University, the New School, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She later lived and worked in Virginia from the late 1980s. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Birmingham Museum of Art among others. Her geometric abstract paintings used color and texture to convey energy and tempo. She placed in each of her works a circle to depict the never-ending continuation of natural order and all matter.
