Mildred Thompson’s “Cosmos Calling” at Galerie Lelong, New York: Painting the Music of the Planets

Few painters have tried to make the solar system audible. Mildred Thompson’s “Cosmos Calling” at Galerie Lelong in New York brings together the paintings in which she did exactly that. Running from 29 October to 19 December 2026 in Chelsea, the exhibition pairs monumental planetary canvases with the electronic music the artist composed to accompany them. For anyone who cares about American abstraction, it is one of the most unusual propositions of the autumn season.

Who was Mildred Thompson?

Thompson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936 and died in Atlanta in 2003. Galerie Lelong describes her as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, poet, musician and professor — a list that reads less like a CV than a temperament. She was associate editor of the Atlanta magazine ART PAPERS from 1989 to 1997, and performed with her partner Donna Jackson as the duo WedoBLUES. She settled in Atlanta in 1986 as artist-in-residence at Spelman College and later taught at the Atlanta College of Art.

Her institutional standing today is formidable. The gallery lists her work in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Brooklyn Museum, Glenstone, the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Museum surveys have followed in steady succession: Resonance at the SCAD Museum of Art (2016), Against the Grain at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2018), The Atlanta Years, 1986–2003 at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (2019) and Frequencies at ICA Miami (2025). “Cosmos Calling” is Lelong’s third exhibition devoted to her.

Mildred Thompson’s Music of the Spheres: abstraction you can hear

The title of her central series borrows an idea as old as Pythagoras: that the planets, moving in their orbits, sound a cosmic harmony. Thompson gave the ancient metaphor a modern, literal twist. According to the gallery, each painting in the Music of the Spheres series is devoted to a single planet and is paired with an electronic composition inspired by NASA’s Voyager recordings, built from electronics, toy instruments and found objects. The paintings themselves are large triptychs of about eight by twelve feet — scaled to the body, so that standing in front of one is closer to being inside weather than looking at a picture.

Thompson also gave each planet an emotional character. In the gallery’s account, Mercury stands for communication and contentment, Venus for vitality and beauty, Jupiter for optimism and enthusiasm, and Mars for passion and violent change. Works named on the exhibition page include Music of the Spheres: Mercury (1996, oil on board, 96 x 144 inches) and Music of the Spheres: Jupiter (1996, oil on board, a triptych of the same overall size). Seeing the planets side by side, with their soundtracks, turns the gallery into something like an observatory tuned to feeling rather than optics.

The Heliocentric Series: painting gravity

Alongside the planetary triptychs, the exhibition includes works from Thompson’s Heliocentric Series: magenta and pink abstractions in which spiralling ovoid forms are crossed by bands of cobalt blue. The gallery reads them as images of orbital motion and of the balance between gravity and inertia — the tug-of-war that keeps a planet circling rather than falling or flying away. An untitled work from the series, made around 1993–94, is painted in oil on vinyl, a support that painters in the audience will want to look at closely for how it takes and reflects colour. An earlier work, Crescendo III (1988), is also listed, its musical title a reminder that sound was in her thinking long before the planets were.

Thompson’s own statement, quoted by the gallery, frames the whole project: “My works are physical manifestations of my understanding and appreciation for the experience.” The experience in question is the invisible — the forces of astrophysics and music that she could not see but wanted to make tangible.

Why “Cosmos Calling” matters now

The timing is deliberate. The gallery notes that the exhibition coincides with “Hard Art” at MoMA PS1 and “Along the Color Line” at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, placing Thompson within a wider conversation that institutions on both sides of the Atlantic are currently having. Her steadily growing museum presence over the past decade reflects a broader reassessment of American abstraction beyond its most familiar names.

For painters, the show is a masterclass in translating something non-visual — data, sound, physical law — into colour, scale and rhythm without falling into illustration. For collectors, Thompson is an estate-represented artist with unusually deep institutional holdings; Lelong does not publish prices or availability, so enquiries should go directly to the gallery. For everyone else, it is simply rare to be invited to listen to a painting.

Galerie Lelong and the Chelsea season

Galerie Lelong & Co. is located at 528 West 26th Street, in the heart of Chelsea’s gallery district. Two related events are planned on the opening weekend: a Meditation Session on 30 October and a Panel Discussion on 31 October — the first an apt companion to an exhibition that asks for slow, attentive listening. Check the gallery’s events pages for times and booking.

Visiting information

Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. 29 October – 19 December 2026. Opening reception: Thursday 29 October, 6–8pm. Opening hours are not stated on the exhibition page, so check before visiting: +1 212 315 0470 or [email protected].

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more New York and Los Angeles openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.