African-American artist Mavis Pusey was born Mavis Iona Pusey in Kingston, Jamaica on September 17, 1928 and grew up in the small rural village of Retreat. Her aunt taught her how to sew and by the age of nine Mavis was designing and making her own clothes. Wanting to study fashion in America, Pusey left Jamaica at the age of eighteen in the hopes of studying at the Traphagen School of Fashion, but costs were prohibitive despite being employed as a seamstress for a couture wedding gown company.

After earning a scholarship from the Ford Foundation in her early 20s, Pusey then set her sights on the Arts Students' League in New York. Though she again enrolled with the aim of becoming a fashion designer, she was exposed to a variety of art mediums and techniques at the renowned East Coast artists' hub and before long her interest switched to printmaking. She studied both painting and printmaking under Will Barnet who encouraged her study of Modern art, a pivotal discovery for Pusey. After four years of immersion in the ASL, immigration officers informed her that her student visa had expired and she moved to London to live with her brothers, becoming a pattern maker for Singer while working on renewing her passport.

In 1968 she traveled to Paris to continue her studies, and in 1968 she was given her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Louis Soulanges. As she worked on renewing her U.S. visa she studied at the prominent Birgit Skiöld Print Workshop on Charlotte Street in London, among whose students were counted David Hockney and Dieter Roth. By 1969 Pusey was back in New York and then Virginia, where she enrolled in Mary Baldwin College, receiving her B.A. Between 1969 and 1972 Pusey worked at the Robert Blackburn Workshop the New School for Social Research in New York. She exhibited with Curwen Gallery in London and Associated American Artists in New York, and in 1971 she was included in the seminal show "Contemporary Black Artists in America" at the Whitney Museum and in 1986 at the MoMA exhibit "Progressions: A Cultural Legacy".

In 1988, after sixteen years and a determined but losing battle to keep her artist’s loft in New York, she found herself adrift. She instructed her real estate agent to find her a home “about two hours outside of Washington.” She settled on a cottage in Orange County, Virginia. “My friends thought I was nutty. I left New York to go live in the bush.” She continued to exhibit and she taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Drew University, New Jersey; and the New School for Social Research, New York. She was affiliated with Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and the Visual Artists and Galleries Association. Mavis Pusey died in Falmouth, Virginia, on April 20, 2019.

Collections:
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Smithsonian African-American Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; the Swope Museum of Art, Kentucky; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Cochran Collection, La Grange, Georgia; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan; and in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where her work was exhibited as part of the Kemper Museum's traveling show, "Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today" in January of 2018.

Scholarships, Grants and Awards:
Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant; Ford Foundation scholarship; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, 1972 and 1973; the United Negro College Fund in 1977; Staten Island Museum tour Award in 1975; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, 1997; Area IV Advisory Panelist, Virginia Commission for the Arts, 1997, to name a few. Her work was handled by the Associated American Artists, New York; Curwen Gallery, London; Roads Gallery, New York and Louis Soulanges, Paris.