Mavis Pusey was a painter and printmaker who drew on inspirations as varied as sunsets and scenes of urban demolition to create striking works full of geometric forms. Pusey lived and worked in New York City and made works that reflected the city’s constantly changing landscape. ​“I am inspired by the energy and the beat of the construction and demolition of these buildings,” she said, adding, ​“The tempo and movement mold into a synthesis and, for me, become another aesthetic of abstraction.” 

One of her first major museum exhibitions was Contemporary Black Artists in America at the Whitney Museum in 1971. Her works were exhibited at museums and galleries around the country and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, however, she was widely unknown. Pusey worked in non-representational, hard-edged abstraction, a genre dominated by male artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.