EXHIBITIONS & UPDATES // Waterways

Mavis Pusey “Mavis Pusey: Mobile Images”

Institute of Contemporary Art

Co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem

July 11 – December 7, 2025

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

Artist Mavis Pusey was born in Jamaica in 1928 and immediately beset by tragedy: Both her mother and father died in her early childhood—but little information exists as to why or how or exactly when. We know that her aunt raised her in the rural inland town of Retreat, but most of her life was forward motion, the routes of her travels crisscrossing the Atlantic like the strings of a corset.

In a perfectly unremarkable but formative act, her aunt taught her to sew. But it set her on a particular current: In Retreat, she was making dresses for her caretaker by the age of nine. Her first job was in a clothing factory in Kingston, Jamaica, much closer to the sea she would eventually cross to get to America. At eighteen, she moved to New York to work in the fashion industry. //

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