Denyse Thomasos
Denyse Thomasos was a Trinidadian-Canadian painter known for her abstract-style wall murals that conveyed themes of slavery, confinement and the story of African and Asian Diaspora. Hybrid Nations is one of her most notable pieces that features Thomasos' signature use of dense thatchwork patterning and architectonic images to portray images of American superjails and traditional African weavework.
Early life and education
Denyse Thomasos was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to Jennie Ann and Raymond Garth Thomasos, who attained his BS in University College of the West Indies and was a high school teacher at a boys' school. Her father's family was politically involved in Trinidad and her great-uncle was the first Black List of speakers of [the House of Representatives of Trinidad and Tobago|Speaker of the House of Representatives].Thomasos and her family emigrated to Canada in 1970, settling in Toronto, Ontario, near Lawrence Avenue West and Keele Street. Her father obtained a master's degree in physics from the University of Waterloo and continued his career as a high school teacher. At the age of fifteen, Thomasos began taking drawing classes, where she especially enjoyed gesture drawing.
Thomasos received her BA from the University of Toronto, Mississauga where she studied painting and art history. She was politically active at this time, participating in divestment actions and protests against apartheid, which became a major theme represented in her paintings from this period. Thomasos' father died weeks before she entered graduate school. The grief from this loss influenced her early paintings. It was at this point that her work began to shift away from representational to more abstract works, as she searched for an "emotional connection with the paint and the canvas." Thomasos received her MFA in painting and sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1989, after attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, in 1988.
Career and works
Thomasos was known for architectionic structures and wall paintings. Due to the partially figurative nature of her work, Thomasos' art style has been described as "semi-abstractionist" by writer Esi Edugyan and as "representational abstraction" by curator Ben Portis. Thomasos often preferred site-specific installations over standard exhibitions. Her work was, in part, inspired by travel, slavery and its psychological impact on people of color, and the prison-industrial complex. Thomasos researched and photographed super-max jail sites during the Bush years.She was a professor at the Tyler [School of Art and Architecture|Tyler School of Art] at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Associate Professor of Art at Rutgers University's Arts, Culture and Media Department from 1995 to 2012.
In 1994, Thomasos installed a mural entitled Recollect at contemporary artist-run centre Mercer Union in Toronto, Ontario. Her painting Babylon was acquired by Carr Hall at St. Michael's College in Toronto, Ontario.
Selected exhibitions
Thomasos' first solo exhibition was in 1995 at Alpha Gallery in Boston. Her other exhibitions included "Inside" at Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga; "60 Painters" at Humber Arts & Media Studios in Etobicoke, Ontario; "Formerly Exit Five: Portable Monuments to Recent History" at the University of Saskatchewan College Art Galleries in Saskatoon; "From Superjails to Super Paintings" at Olga Korper Gallery; "Swing Space: Wallworks" at the Art Gallery of Ontario; "Tracking: Bombings, Wars & Genocide: A Six Months Journey from New York to China, Vietnam, Cambodia & Indonesia" at MSVU Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia; and "Rewind" at the Art Gallery of Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Sherbrooke, Quebec.Selected collections
Thomasos' work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario among other institutions.Legacy
Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto, Ontario hosted a memorial exhibition of her work in November 2012. Another posthumous show, "Urban Jewels," was hosted in 2013 at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, curated by Ben Portis. Another memorial exhibition entitled "Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey," curated by Gaëtane Verna and Sarah Milroy, was organized in collaboration with the McMichael [Canadian Art Collection] at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from November 2021 to February 2022. In 2022, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Remai Modern organized the large retrospective exhibition Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond with a catalogueco-edited by the exhibition curators Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater and Michelle Jacques.