Mildred Thompson painting New Acquisition @ The Williams College Museum of Art

Mildred Thompson painting New Acquisition @ The Williams College Museum of Art

On your next museum visit, we invite you to spend time in the Reading Room just off the Weston Rotunda, where Mildred Thompson’s painting Advancing Impulses (1997) is now on view.

Mildred Thompson (American, 1936–2003) was a pioneering Black LGBTQ artist, writer, musician, and educator whose visual art practice included painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Known for her abstract language of bright colors and calligraphic forms, Thompson said of her compositions that “there are symbolic things that have to be learned to make work universal—you can’t limit who you communicate with. … But you have to know yourself. Everything I touch will be part Black and female—all my success and the things I have gotten are part of that.”

This new addition to the collection was proposed by students in the course Acquiring Art: Selecting and Purchasing Objects for WCMA, Fall 2021, namely Minsuh Choi ’23, Olivia DeMuth ’23, Kailyn Gibson ’22, Delaney Keenan MA ’23, Emily Neuner ’22, and Lina Wang ’24. Look for more new acquisitions selected by the Fall 2021 Acquiring Art students in the next iteration of Remixing the Hall later this month, including works by Guadalupe Maravilla and Allison Janae Hamilton.