Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
The exhibition is largely populated by works at an immersive and ambitious scale, such as the twelve-foot wide I’m Feelin Good (2014). Unifying these larger-than-life subjects together in the museum’s galleries inviting viewers to enter the bold and dynamic universe the artist has created, where steadfast love overcomes political strife. In addition to towering wall works, video collages such as Angelitos Negros (2016) is presented. Its work immortalizes the late singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who dared to sing songs of the absence of Black angels in art history. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Thomas provides a respite space for Black women to see and be seen, a place to be through its being.
Joey Krebs
Correspondent
The Eli Broad Museum announced the debut exhibition by Black Contemporary Artist Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Its show premieres from May 25th to September 29th, 2024. The exhibition is a bold celebration of love from this visionary feminist showcasing black female bodies influencing our notions of black female identity and sexuality.
Its exhibition title is sourced from the visionary feminist and author bell hooks, where love and its expression of being is celebrated through a cathartic process, one that is reflective of healing, and critical of hegemonic gendered domination with its intent to liberate its systemic archaic history.
Thomas’s colorful pallete choice is a colorful mosaic of Black female empowerment, highlighted by monochromatic tones of black culture, and colored in through a world of black love.
Mickalene Thomas’s fight the power figures are unapologetic large scale portraits of the black female body, a colorful mosaic of empowerment, challenging the conventional boundaries of both traditional techniques with display of rhinestones, bold monochromatic tones portraits of female representation, which speaks of the many others who have been excluded and marginalized by the history of art. Thomas’s challenges conventional boundaries of technique and material, exploring new boundaries, addressing commentary of culture and society, where the politics of black is beautiful is heroically depicted and painted with a black vision that will not perish.
Mickalene Thomas Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge 2023 Rhinestones, acrylic and glitter on canvas mounted on wood panel 90 x 110 in. © Mickalene Thomas
All About is the artist’s earliest inquiries into visual culture, sexuality, memory, erotica and moves sagaciously through a critique of the past into the present with an eye towards the future. Thomas asks you to review the early photographic triptych, Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003), an on view piece which depicts the artist’s first inspirational muse her mother, which explores kinship and care. These modes of intimate relations are informed through exhibited work such as Portrait of Maya No. 10 (2017) from the Broad collection. This acrylic and rhinestone work embodies Thomas’s signature pieces which apply several layers of material and symbolic meaning unmasking our world of appearances onto a single surface. At eight feet tall, the subject is empowered, sparkled, and poised, commanding her outward gaze.
The exhibition is largely populated by works at an immersive and ambitious scale, such as the twelve-foot wide I’m Feelin Good (2014). Unifying these larger-than-life subjects together in the museum’s galleries inviting viewers to enter the bold and dynamic universe the artist has created, where steadfast love overcomes political strife. In addition to towering wall works, video collages such as Angelitos Negros (2016) is presented. Its work immortalizes the late singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who dared to sing songs of the absence of Black angels in art history. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Thomas provides a respite space for Black women to see and be seen, a place to be through its being.
Thomas’s colorful pallete is a mosaic of Black female empowerment, bold and unapologetic.
Her works are rich in color, composed through dramatic shapes and dripping in beautifully placed rhinestones. Thomas works challenge societies conventional sanitized notions, questions the politics of identity, culture and fashion found in mainstream society. Her subjects are shown in various provocative poses, at times, dissected and reassembled with overlapping images of a different texture and color to illustrate the fragmentation of how throughout history black bodies have been misrepresented and oppressed, offering a new visual code which seeks to reverse its inequity by giving birth to a new black language of reality.
Mickalene Thomas Resist #11: A Price to Pay 2023 Rhinestones, acrylic and oil on canvas mounted on wood panel 84 x 108 in. © Mickalene Thomas
Mickalene Thomas was born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, where she completed her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002 followed with a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. Soon after she became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose, employing jewels as a central material in her practice, one that symbolizes the complexities of jeweled femininity. Thomas depicts women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing arts 1000 year historical canon. Thomas’s photographs, collages, and figurative paintings re-stage scenes from 19th century French male painters such as Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet, questioning oppressive narratives authored by Western white dominant male ideology, and contests how black representation needs to be represented and redefined within our cultural defined institutions.
The motifs of Thomas exhibition will extend into a full slate of associated programming developed in collaboration with the artist, including a summer concert series and in-gallery programs centering women and Black and queer communities. Additional program will be announced in its upcoming future months.
Mickalene Thomas Afro Goddess Looking Forward 2015 Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel 60 x 96 x 2 in. © Mickalene Thomas
The Exhibition is co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in associate partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of this pioneering artist of diversity. Staging its debut at The Broad with over 80 works made by the artist over the last 20 years, the exhibition highlights how Mickalene Thomas masters’ innovative disciplines and new genre is formed from mixed-media painting and collage to installation and photography.
Mickalene Thomas Portrait of Maya #10 2017 Rhinestones and acrylic paint on canvas mounted wood panel 96 x 84 in. © Mickalene Thomas
