Phyllis Thompson (American, born 1946) is one of the leading matriarchs of artmaking in the region, earning wide respect in our community among colleagues, educators, makers, and appreciators alike. Thompson is soft-spoken and not a self-promoter by nature, preferring the studio environment to the bustle of art-world events. Luckily, the Buffalo AKG has no qualms about championing the work of incredible artists. Public Art Curator Aaron Ott discusses recent works of Thompson's that have been acquired by the museum.

In her affecting but subtle work Ancestor with Sunday Hat, 2016, Thompson coyly suggests that’s all there is to see. A perceptive viewer will notice Thompson’s signature additions, here as subdued and delicate as her subject. Ghostly lace hangs in the air above the stoic woman—one of Thompson’s ancestors—as she directs her gaze toward the camera, towards us. The mere fact that this woman was photographed in her Sunday best suggests that she was part of a family and community of means; not everyone and certainly not every Black family could afford portraits of this kind more than a century ago. The photography of the era required a long exposure time, and the resulting sense of stoicism is clear in the subject’s forced stillness. Introducing monoprint, Thompson’s forces an unusual flattening of the pictorial space: foreground and background are merged, as if compressed by the weight of time and not merely the artist’s hand.

A companion and foil to Thompson’s Ancestor is found in Presence, 2016. Presence offers us only absence, a triptych of outlines and pattern but without her ancestors’ actual physical being. In lieu of reprinting a photograph of a family member, Thompson alternatively provides only the silhouette, repeated and flipped, layered and embodied by decorative ornamentation, reminiscent of wallpaper or a table runner. There is a haunting feeling to the work with its eerie removal of the identity of the subject, like the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The purposeful omission is filled with meaning. The ghostly visage may simply represent the loss of detail we experience with the passing generations; or it may recall how the men of Thompson’s past were treated as less than men—as people to overlook, people not even seen.