Panel Discussion: Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling

Alexandra M. Thomas is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University, where she teaches modern and contemporary, African and African diaspora, and feminist and queer art history courses. She holds a PhD in Black Studies and History of Art from Yale and is currently working on her first book, Errant Constellations: Mildred Thompson, Abstraction, and the Universe.

David Max Horowitz is Associate Curator, Collections, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where he has served on the curatorial staff since 2015. He specializes in post-World War II art and the histories and legacies of abstraction. His exhibitions include Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration (2022); Marking Time: Process in Minimal Abstraction (2019–21); Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (2018–19); R. H. Quaytman: + ×, Chapter 34 (2018–19); and Agnes Martin (2016–17). His writing has appeared in the catalogues for Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century (2025); Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930 (2024); Hilma af Klint (2024); Alex Katz: Gathering (2022); Joan Mitchell (2021); and Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (2018). He works closely on the stewardship of the collection and is an organizing curator of the Young Collectors Council.

Melissa Messina is an Independent Curator and Executive Director of the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project. For 25 years, her exhibitions, site-responsive projects, and public programs have been presented in cultural institutions throughout the United States and abroad. She has recently guest curated solo exhibitions for Maya Lin and Duke Riley at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art; Curtis Patterson at the Hilliard Art Museum, Lafayette, LA, and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA; and Mildred Thompson at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, and was the co-curator of the 2018 and 2020 Bermuda Biennials. In 2017, Messina co-curated Magnetic Fields, Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition celebrating abstraction by 21 Black female artists that toured from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. She was formerly the Interim Executive Director and Senior Curator of the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; the National Program Director for ArtTable, NY; and a founding staff member and then guest curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She most recently spearheaded the renovation of Mildred Thompson's historic home in Atlanta, GA, for use as a multidisciplinary residency and program space. Her co-curated exhibition Janet Fish: Place in Time, which originated in Bermuda, is currently traveling throughout the U.S.

Shinique Smith’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, public art, and performance, and is known for gestural abstraction and bundled fabric forms. Working with breath, calligraphic gesture, and ritual, as in her ongoing performance practice Breathing Room (initiated 2018), she transforms personal and collected materials into works that explore memory, culture, and spiritual transformation. Smith is also developing The BRIA (Breathing Room Institute for the Arts), an artist residency in New Mexico that grows out of this practice.

Smith’s work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the UBS Art Collection, and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, among others. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Ringling Museum of Art, as well as solo presentations for the UBS Art Collection in New York and at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Her work has been included in landmark group exhibitions including Frequency (Studio Museum in Harlem), UnMonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (New Museum), and the 8th Busan Biennale, and in the traveling exhibitions 30 Americans, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, Black American Portraits, and The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.

Her work is currently on view in Revelation: A Journey into Abstraction at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is also a contributor to the accompanying publication (Rizzoli); in Geometries at the Studio Museum in Harlem; in The American Century at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville; and in Bold: New Voices in Contemporary Art at Newfields.

Smith earned her BFA and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MAT from Tufts University. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Smith was born in 1971 in Baltimore, Maryland, and lives and works between Los Angeles, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico.