One of Ms. Pusey’s first major showings was part of “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” an important exhibition mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Almost a half-century later she was again part of a major exhibition, “Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today,” at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.

In between the two, her works were exhibited at museums, colleges and galleries around the country and found their way into the Cochran Collection in LaGrange, Ga., the Museum of Modern Art in New York and elsewhere. Yet Ms. Pusey was not a familiar name even to some within the art world.

Longstanding biases in that world were partly responsible. Melissa Messina, who curated the Kemper show with Erin Dziedzic, was candid as to why people familiar with the names of abstract artists from the same era, like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, might not recognize hers.

“It is not because Pusey’s work is any less groundbreaking, pristinely executed, or formally and conceptually evocative,” she said by email. “Simply put: It is because she was black and a woman.”