My educational activities, curated installations and art making are all interwoven parts of who I am as an artist. This was accurately described in an introduction to one of my recent installations by Carlos Palacios, an international curator, based in Mexico City. “John R. Thompson (Schenectady, New York, 1947) is an extraordinarily complete artist, and not only because of his enigmatic and heterodoxical artworks nor solely on the basis of his career as a teacher, carried out for many years at the prestigious Parsons School of Design, the experimental Vershire School in Vermont and as one of the founders of the Lake Placid School of Art in New York. Thompson is an artist who conceives of creation from three different vantage points that run parallel to his artistic production and that have given him an enormous and unusual creative liberty: as the instigator of the exhibition space 108ag_ projects in Colonia Juárez in Mexico City; as a collector with the eye of an artist; and last but not least, as a curator. It is impossible to disengage his work from these activities. Thompson is, to paraphrase the title of his most recent exhibition, “forging connections” between his dense artistic work, curatorship and his highly original collection of contemporary art”.

For this exhibit of my selected works from 2010 to 2020, I liked the challenge, suggested by Leïla G. Voight, of choosing paintings and sculptures in a solo show which would present an evolvement of my work but also show a history of recurrent themes, colors, materials.