Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling at Galerie Lelong & Co. — Painting the Invisible Universe

Key facts

• Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling opens October 29 and runs through December 19, 2026, at Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West 26th Street, New York.
• The exhibition title comes from Thompson’s 1990s electronic music composition Cosmos Calling, which accompanied her Music of the Spheres paintings.
• The Music of the Spheres series comprises four paintings representing Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, each with an original electronic composition.
• Thompson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936 and studied at Howard University, the Brooklyn Museum School, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.
• She served as associate editor of ART PAPERS from 1989 to 1997 and performed music with Donna Jackson as WedoBLUES.
• Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Glenstone, Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
• In 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, presented Mildred Thompson: Frequencies, the most comprehensive solo museum exhibition of her work to date, with approximately fifty works spanning 1959–1999.
• The ICA Miami exhibition included selections from Thompson’s Heliocentric Series (circa 1990–94) and the Music of the Spheres paintings.