Basement Wine by Denyse Thomasos

Born in 1964 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Thomasos emigrated with her family to Canada in 1970, settling in Mississauga, Ontario. Earning her Bachelor of Arts in painting and art history at the University of Toronto in 1987, she went on to receive her MFA in painting and sculpture at the Yale School of Art in 1989.

Her works are accomplished in a semi-abstract style and focus on urban landscapes while conveying themes of slavery, confinement and the story of African and Asian Diaspora. Political in nature, her works were inspired by her extensive travel and development of rapidly growing communities imploring the viewer to consider mass organization as forms and figures stack on top of one another. There is a nod to architectural drawings and blue prints with an emphasis on line and geometry in her works with a strong trace of the artist's gesture.

Thomasos was a professor at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and then (beginning in 1995), Associate Professor of Art at  Rutgers University's Arts, Culture and Media Department. She was awarded a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1999 Canada Council Millennium Grant, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting and completed a travel residency at the American Academy in Rome.  The artist passed away unexpectedly from an allergic reaction during a medical procedure in 2012 in New York.