When Thomasos was living in Philadelphia in the 1980s and beginning her work as an artist, she was looking at African textiles and at the architecture of the city, which is famous for its row houses. That's when, she says, she "moved away from heavy content and into structure." Always concerned with political issues, Thomasos began with models that suggested such themes, like the structure of slave ships. One book that influenced her was an extraordinary volume, Slave Ships and Slaving, by Charles Francis Dow. This work helped fuel her investigations into the nature of structure. It should not be surprising that Thomasos would find her way to making abstract art through such a source. "My ideas don't come out of blue," she says. "They come out of 1980s, out of the political work that was done in the 80s."

It is this concern with realism, and with realistic structure, that led Thomasos to abstraction. She didn't begin with the rhetoric, or the heady ideology, of abstract art, and, in contrast to both Clark and Whitney, seems to be in a very different relationship to the sort of "purposiveness without purpose" concerns that inspire the others.

Thomasos, whose work can include forms painted and hatched on walls or on objects in an installation, seems concerned with getting us to see the inner structural forms of objects to which we might otherwise attach some social or political meaning. The shape of a slave detention and transport center on Africa's West Coast, for instance, might yield, in its inner form, a shape which, in its starkness and barrenness, is equally terrifying as the original structure.

But this way of finding one's self an abstract painter through a concern with mimesis raises a number of questions, in a kind of reflective, mirror-image way, that are similar to those that concern the other two painters in this show. For one thing, what is the relationship between representation and "abstraction"? How is it possible that an artist can paint deeply non-representational work, as Thomasos has done, and yet continue to have representational concerns at the forefront of her consciousness?