Mickalene Thomas - All About Love

"The central place of my work, and my art, is from a loving space."
— Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas (1971, New York) is an emblematic artist on the American scene, celebrated for her fresh, resolutely committed view of the place of Black women in history, art and society.

Her work is rooted in a long study of art history and classical portraiture, whose codes she reinvents through the definition of a powerful queer aesthetic and Black eroticism. Often monumental, her compositions, combining painting, photography, collage, video and installation, challenge traditional concepts of beauty, sexuality and femininity, while celebrating their diversity and plurality. The concept of love as a means of emancipation and affirmation lies at the heart of this reflection.

All About Love is a celebration of Mickalene Thomas’s art as an exploration of love, leisure and joy. The title is inspired by the book All About Love: New Visions (1999), in which feminist author bell hooks emphasizes the importance of experiencing love in all its forms, and how “the love we make in community stays with us wherever we go”.

The body of work in this exhibition reflects above all this love for Black radical identity. Her entire body of work is dedicated to celebrating Black women and their individual and collective aspiration to occupy a social and artistic space, an access still too often denied them. Mickalene Thomas’s works depict her mother, lovers, friends and famous singers and writers whom she admires, inviting the viewer into the heart of her personal world. Through photography, collage, video or painting, enhanced with enamel and rhinestones, the artist captures all the strength, vulnerability and sensual presence of the models who face us, with a gaze full of confidence. Her portraits, magnified by vibrant, richly textured compositions, depict Black women in domestic spaces or landscapes who leisure themselves to rest and relaxation, asserting their right to pleasure and self-expression.

This exploration is rooted in Mickalene Thomas’s reinterpretation and disruption of emblematic moments in the European and especially French art history, where women are generally shaped by the painter and offered to his gaze. A whole section of the exhibition is devoted to this essential aspect of her work, where women are confidently positioned and find comfort at the forefront of their claimed renowned compositions, such as Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) or Jean-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814). The great themes of painting, from landscapes to interior scenes, become a space for expressing, even reinvesting, the power of love and the eroticism of women.

"I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women - my muses - to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms."
— Mickalene Thomas

Domestic interiors act as backdrops for many of Thomas’s artworks: as environments for her subjects to inhabit in photo shoots, backgrounds for her paintings and, in the nave of Les Abattoirs, installations that recreate rooms recalled from childhood, especially those of her mother and grandmother.

‘The living room is where we see black imagination made visual’, writes poet Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior. She suggests that the home holds a sacred significance for African Americans who have grappled with the impermanence of place perpetrated by enslavement, segregation and gentrification. The home, and more specifically the living room, becomes a place for reclaiming power and asserting culture and creativity.

In the installations showcased here, Thomas explores how we shape our identities through the spaces we inhabit; the clothes we wear; the music we listen to; and the books we read. She reflects, “I chose to be an artist to connect more deeply with what is true to myself, as creating art is an extension of who I am.”

 

I was born to do great things
2014
Multi-media installation
Courtesy of the artist

In this installation, the artist reconstructs, in the form of “tableaux”, living rooms from two distinct periods of her young life. On one side is a room recalling her grandmother’s apartment in the late 1970s; on the other side, her mother’s living room in the 1980s, as seen in a pair of polaroids of her mother placed within the installation. For Thomas, these environments bring forth memories of safe spaces where women would joyfully gather. "I would be outside, with my ear to the door, trying to be part of the excitement when I should have been upstairs sleeping", recalls the artist.

Inside the living room is one of Mickalene Thomas’s early works, the triptych Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003). It shows the artist’s mother, Sandra Bush, posing in the style of actress Pam Grier, star of Blaxploitation, a major film movement of the 1970s. After her mother’s passing in 2012, Thomas honoured her memory with bronze casts of personal items, such as her bracelets, which are displayed in the installation. The tableaux also include upholstered furnishings as a tribute to her grandmother, who used second-hand clothing to mend her furniture.

"My work is rooted in self-discovery, celebration, joy, sensuality, and a need to see positive images of Black women in the world."
— Mickalene Thomas

The women depicted in Mickalene Thomas’s paintings are the artist’s muses drawn from her circle of friends, family, girlfriends and hired models. She often works with the same women to create numerous artworks over a period of years. She says of her muses, they are individuals who are deeply in touch with their own beauty, radiating both boldness and vulnerability simultaneously. Self-portraiture is also central to her work, as in Afro Goddess Looking Forward, where the artist embodies herself as a muse.

Thomas’s creative process begins by photographing her muses within bespoke sets in her Brooklyn studio. These photographs form the basis of paintings in oil, acrylic and enamel paint which are inlaid with lustrous multi-colored rhinestones. Originally chosen by the artist as affordable substitutes for oil paints, these materials have since become her signature. They enhance the glamour of Thomas’ muses while reflecting themes in her paintings such as dressing up and enhancing their beauty.’

Thomas’s paintings are in deliberate dialogue with Western art history, borrowing archetypal poses and compositions. Yet these artworks subvert a male-dominated tradition, claiming space for Black women to take center stage.

 

Afro Goddess Looking Forward
2015
Rhinestones, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel Courtesy of the artist

In this painting, Mickalene Thomas presents herself as both artist and muse. Referencing a photographic self-portrait originally captured in 2006, the artist is seen in a leisurely, majestic pose, radiating ease and confidence. Thomas’s painted figure is collaged with a slightly enlarged photograph of her eyes, like a mask. The artist asserts her presence in the artistic and museum space, challenging the historical marginalization and objectification of Black individuals in Western portraiture traditions.

 

Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge
2023
Rhinestones, glitter and acrylic paint on canvas mounted on wood panel Collection Mugrabi

"Din is a shy medical student who transforms like a chameleon, unlike any other woman I’ve worked with."

Din, one of Mickalene Thomas’s longtime muses, is depicted here in an intimate scene, surrounded by a lavish interior of patterned textiles. Although Din holds the mirror nonchalantly in her right hand, she does not need to look into it to recognise her own beauty. Instead, she gazes directly at the viewer with poise and confidence.

From the outset of her career, Mickalene Thomas has developed a particular style of portrait photography: designing sets in her studio for her models to inhabit. She aimed to make her subjects feel comfortable in spaces that exude both ease and elegance. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Malian photographer Seydou Keïta, she constructs backdrops using draped fabrics, furniture and various props.

Under the lens, the models pose in outfits chosen or created by the artist, as in Déjeuner sur l’herbe: three black women. Mickalene Thomas has an intimate relationship with fashion, first and foremost through her mother, Sandra Bush, a former model, who is featured in two of the photographs in this room. She sees clothing style as a radical gesture of self-assertion. Her models’ outfits are imbued with various urban styles from the 1970’s to the contemporary period.

At first, these photographs were used as resources for her paintings, but over time the artist has embraced her photographs as artworks in their own right, alongside the collages that here testify to the breadth of her work, including album artwork, editorials, and the artist’s own studio photography. Notable subjects include her mother, the singer Solange Knowles, or her fellow artist and friend Carrie Mae Weems.

 

Nus Exotiques #6
2023
Colour photograph, mixed media paper, rhinestones and acrylic paint on museum paper mounted on Dibond
Collection ACP, France

Nus Exotiques #2
2023
Colour photograph, mixed media paper, rhinestones and acrylic paint on museum paper mounted on Dibond
Collection Privée, Rennes

With the Nus Exotiques series, she turns to Europe as an alternative cultural lens to examine the African diaspora and how Black models have been perceived, fetishized and exoticized by the Western gaze, in a colonial context. The series takes its name from a 1950s French photography magazine featuring portraits of nude black women by Italian photographer Paul Facchetti. The artist approaches these photographs - created by and for White men - from the perspective of a Black queer woman, intent on challenging and subverting the power dynamics of the original images. She invites us to engage the conventional image embodied in this imagery, and to question the evolution of the way Black bodies have been viewed over time.

"‘I define my work as a feminist and political act… I’m Black, Queer and a woman."
— Mickalene Thomas

While Thomas’s art uplifts and dismantles injustices and hardships faced by Black women, this recent series of paintings shifts its focus to the brutality of the Black experience in America, centering on Civil Rights activism from the 1960s to the present.

The painting Say their names (Resist #6) serves as a memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody, urging the viewer to remember the names of countless victims.

The flanking painting, Power to the people (Resist #12) explore the central role of Black women within civil rights activism from the 1960s onwards. Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the Civil Rights era with images from recent protests and uprising related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. Following the path paved by artists such as Romare Bearden (1911-1988) and Faith Ringgold, she uses collage as a political tool both to reveal violence and injustice, and to create new narratives that bear witness to and teach resistance.

 

Resist #12: Power to the People
2023 Rhinestones, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/Brussels

Here, Thomas reflects on the pivotal role of Black women in U.S. civil rights activism and the impact of protest photography. Silkscreened images of police violence against civil rights demonstrators from the 1960s are layered across the canvas. At the center, the image of Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights leader, is shown being carried by fellow protesters after she was injured when police attacked a demonstration in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. This event, known as Bloody Sunday, became a catalyst for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sought to end racial discrimination in voting

 

Guernica Detail (Resist #7)
2021
Rhinestones, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel Private Collection, care of Dominique Lévy, New York

This work is a collage of U.S. civil rights protests of the 1960s with more recent protests against police violence. In the lower right, students in 1960s North Carolina are shown protesting for freedom and equality. The upper section depicts a building engulfed in fire from the 2020 uprisings in Minneapolis, Minnesota, following George Floyd’s murder. The work is overlaid with imagery from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a monumental artwork made in response to fascist forces bombing the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By weaving these elements together, Thomas highlights the intergenerational connections between activists and the ongoing fight for civil rights and justice.

Mickalene Thomas’s work is partly rooted in popular culture, with references to film, music and television. The artist grew up in the United States between 1960 and 1980, at the height of the Black is Beautiful movement, which challenged the imposition of white aesthetic standards and promoted Black beauty. On screens, on the radio and in the pages of magazines, Black women found a place to appear, recognize and admire themselves. The artist dedicates the works in this room to several iconic figures of African-American culture who have left their mark on history through the importance of their careers and successes. These include actresses Whoopi Goldberg and Diahann Carroll, model Naomi Sims, and disco diva Eartha Kitt, whose husky, suave voice resonates in the video Angelitos negros.

These icons, whose lives were marked by the struggle to win their place in industries marked by racism and sexism, offer the artist a definition of beauty that is not just about appearance, but also about action and perseverance. Their faces printed on mirrors reflect back our own gaze, creating a relationship based on mutual recognition and validation.

 

Angelitos Negros
2016 8-channel digital video
Courtesy of the artist

For this artwork, Mickalene Thomas was inspired by Eartha Kitt’s song Angelitos Negros (1953), in which the singer implores artists to paint Black angels in their religious paintings. "You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels", the song laments, "but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel". For Thomas, the song was a revelation, speaking to the heart of her own celebratory and joyful images of Black women. This artwork is another example of Thomas’s use of collage, reimagining original footage by combining it with images of herself performing as Eartha Kitt. She creates a powerful experience between past and present, linked by the thread of their voices vibrating in unison.

 

Diahann Carroll #2
2017
Naomi Sims
2016
Silkscreen ink on acrylic mirror mounted on wood panel
Courtesy of the artist

These works feature two of Thomas’s childhood idols: actress Diahann Carroll (1935–2019) and supermodel Naomi Sims (1948–2009). Carroll was the first African American actress to win a Tony award and to star in her own TV series (in a non-domestic servant role). Sims was the first African American model to be featured on the covers of popular US magazines Life and Ladies’ Home Journal.

 

Celie
2016
Silkscreen ink and acrylic paint on acrylic mirror mounted on wood panel
Private Collection

This work features an image of Whoopi Goldberg playing the title role in the 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Colour Purple. The film follows Celie from a childhood of abuse to sisterhood, self-realisation, love, and forgiveness. The relationship between Celie and her lover Shug was the first time Thomas saw love and desire between two Black women depicted on screen. The work is printed on a mirror, echoing how Shug helps Celie understand her own beauty by holding a mirror up to her. Thomas believes that people can become mirrors for each other as a way of co-creating their identities and a powerful form of love and validation.

Thomas created her Brawlin Spitfire Wrestlers series in her early career (2005-2007) to explore multiple sides of herself. All the figures depicted in the paintings are representations of Thomas, featuring the artist Kalup Linzy as her twin. The paintings reveal only one face - the artist’s. The contortions of the figures struggling against themselves embody, in a semi-autobiographical way, the internal conflicts that arise between our multiple identities within society. The figures, locked in an embrace, blur the boundaries between erotic pleasure and pain, struggle and affection, dominance and submission, all expressions of desire.

The artist drew her inspiration both from the Amazon women’s mythology, embodied today by comic-book heroines such as Wonder Woman, and from the iconographic tradition of female wrestlers, from Antiquity to the 15th century sculptures of Italian artist Antonio Pollaiuolo. These representations of strong, seductive women in violent wrestling positions prompt reflection on the complexity of being perceived as a strong, fierce and sexual woman.

From draping patterned fabrics over each other in her photography sets to cutting and rearranging imagery using the papier collé technique, collage is a key element across all the mediums that Thomas works in.

Thomas draws inspiration for her collages from a wide range of sources. She references Romare Bearden (1911–1988) and Faith Ringgold (1930–2024) who used the technique as an expressive means to explore their experiences as 20th century African Americans. Equally influential are European modernists including Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Her use of photocollage as a means of exploring identity and questioning the representations relayed by the mass media can also be traced back to a line of feminist artists such as the German Hannah Höch (1889-1978) and the French Claude Cahun (1894-1954).

Thomas also draws inspiration from Black erotica featured in popular magazines of the 1970s, especially the Jet magazine, with its “Beauty of the Week” centerfolds and pin-up calendars. Blending together past and present archival material encourages viewers to reflect on how visual representations of Black women have endured or evolved over the last fifty years.

 

Jet Blue #15
2020
Colour photograph, mixed media paper, rhinestones, fiberglass screen mesh and Swarovski crystal fabric on hot press paper
Collection Harry G. David

Initiated during the period of isolation imposed by the Covid pandemic, the Jet series was created from archives of Jet magazine.
Jet was created in 1951 by publisher John H. Johnson as a weekly magazine dedicated to African American culture. It served as mouthpieces for the Civil Rights Movement, while also celebrating and profiling Black life, beauty, and fashion. The artist was particularly struck by the “Beauty of the Week” column, a gallery of portraits of young middle-class Black women. By fusing these figures with motifs and collages, she emphasizes their freedom and resistance to media consumption.

 

June 1976
2022
Rhinestones, glitter, charcoal, acrylic and oil paint on canvas on wood panel with oak frame
Mugrabi Collection

The artist also draws on the archives of the Jet calendar, an extension of the eponymous magazine, where anonymous women pose topless, but concealing their lower bodies. Mickalene Thomas reinterprets this game of hide-and-seek, between censorship and eroticism, with a collage of colored squares reminiscent of pixels, sometimes masking the body, sometimes the scenery, sometimes almost making the model disappear (June 1976). In contrast, particular attention is paid to their eyes: enlarged, collaged or drawn, they speak directly to us. Seemingly in control of the desire they arouse, the models look up at us and smile, aware of their power.

 

Untitled #10
2014
Rhinestones, glitter, oil pastel, graphite, acrylic, oil, enamel paint and silkscreen on wood panel
Mugrabi Collection

Thomas’s Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman) series assembles facial features in an exuberant collage of colourful materials. Thomas initially collaborated with her longtime studio makeup artist Vincent Oquendo on small collages quickly made to capture the essence and energy of the subject. Thomas subsequently developed a larger series in closer dialogue to Cubist collage and Pablo Picasso’s Tête de Femme linocuts from the 1960s.

Incorporating nods to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, the artist reinvents abstraction outside the Western canon embodied by Picasso or Matisse. In these colorful faces, there is both a symbolic echo of the masks that Black women must wear to survive, and a broader relationship to identity exploration and self-celebration. As Thomas explains, "these elements are not necessarily about the Black experience ; it’s about the idea of covering up, of dress up and make up – of amplifying how we see ourselves. It’s beyond a Black aesthetic."

Sleep: Deux femmes noires, 2012
2012
Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel paint on wood panel
Private Collection

This work recalls Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) (1866), a painting by French artist Gustave Courbet depicting two White women in a sensual embrace, between the crumpled sheets of a messy bed. Thomas’s reinterpretation of the scene presents two African American women lying in a collaged landscape of lush green trees and peachy sunsets. By placing her models in the middle of a landscape, she moves away from the voyeuristic eroticism permeating Courbet’s intimate bedroom scene, to portray this sapphic love as natural and without shame.

The rhinestones that encircle the contours of the models’ bodies are a singular reappropriation of the pointillist technique. The artist reclaims the use of this handcrafted, ultra-feminine material as a further challenge to the Western pictorial canon.

The study of art history and classical portraiture lies at the heart of Mickalene Thomas’s work. Art - particularly traditional painting - has been used by dominant cultures and elites to promote themselves and perpetuate power structures. The artist uses her art as a means of resistance to the exclusion of Black women from this history, but also against their reduction to figures of servitude or entertainment. In the paintings of this room, she overturns the canonical representation of the nude in Western art history, ousting the nude white woman from the bed where she often lies, accompanied by a receding black servant. From Tan n’ Terrific’s to A Little Taste Outside of Love, it’s the black women who bask, alone, amid rich draperies and jewels, luxuriating in repose.

Although some of them adopt seductive postures, they are far from being relegated to a position of passivity or reification. Depicted in poses of comfort and confidence, Mickalene Thomas’s muses defy racist and misogynist stereotypes to assume the roles of mythical icons and powerful, sensual figures. The imposing size of the canvases and the overhanging gaze of the models establish a relationship based on respect. “They have all the power and control necessary to demand that the viewer meet them in their own space, rather than being exploited or scrutinized,” attests the artist.

 

A Little Taste Outside of Love
2007
Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel paint on wood panel

Brooklyn Museum, gift of Giulia Borghese and Designated Purchase Fund 20087a-c.

During the 18th century, European colonial expansion awakened a fascination for the culture of the Ottoman Empire. Artists began to paint odalisques, servants to the sultan’s court, in languid, reclining poses, such as Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814).

Thomas reinterprets this motif, removing her from the realm of male fantasy and placing her in a space of mutual respect and trust between two women - the artist and model. The subject is Maya, a friend and ex-girlfriend of Thomas. Against a pictorial tradition representing black women “outside of love”, Thomas claims a loving gaze between model and viewer. The artist says of her decision to work at such a large scale, ‘people need to engage with this monumental body, face to face.

France is a particular context for Mickalene Thomas in terms of the references she invokes. Much of her work involves reappropriating iconography constructed by famous French artists, from Ingres to Manet. In addition, many African-American artists and writers she admires, including Josephine Baker, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Lois Mailou Jones and James Baldwin, emigrated here throughout the twentieth century.

In 2011, Thomas traveled to France to take part in a residency at Claude Monet’s house in Giverny. This formative experience deepened her exploration of landscape and domestic space—not just as environments of beauty and leisure, but as sites of artistic creation. She was also struck by Monet’s biography, particularly his resistance to convention and pursuit of personal freedom. The works in this gallery, created for her 2022 exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie, reflect Thomas’s reinterpretation of the spaces Monet crafted for himself. Through collage, crystal, and rhinestone, she reimagines these iconic settings—including her own take on Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a scene famously painted by Manet in 1863 and later revisited by Monet in 1865.

 

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: les Trois Femmes Noires avec Monet
2022
Colour photograph, mixed media paper, rhinestones and acrylic paint on hot press paper mounted on Dibond
Private Collection, Monaco

This work is a radical, festive response to Édouard Manet’s famous 1863 painting, reinterpreted by Monet in 1865-66. Manet’s painting, which provoked extraordinary controversy at the time of its creation, depicts two men enjoying a woodland picnic accompanied by two nude women. Thomas replaces these white figures with a trio of black women adorned with Afro hairstyles and richly printed dresses evoking the 1970s, the height of the civil rights and Black is Beautiful movements in the USA.
Comfortably and proudly installed in this space designed for them, the artist’s three friends stare at us as much as we stare at them, creating a relationship of recognition and validation. Through this pictorial reinterpretation of a canonical motif, Thomas aims to challenge the chauvinism of traditional

 

La Maison de Monet
2022
Colour photograph, mixed media paper, rhinestones and acrylic paint on hot press paper mounted on Dibond
Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/Brussels

In 2011, Thomas took part in a summer residency at Claude Monet’s house and studio, in Giverny. The artist was struck by Monet’s meticulous approach to transforming his residence into a personal creative space. This experience nourished her reflection on the use of domestic spaces as places of inspiration and leisure. During this stay, she testifies, she was free to create in a peaceful environment without having to justify her identity, gender or life: “I was free to look out the window and make a landscape if I felt like it. Free like Monet.”

To design this monumental collage, Thomas drew on the fifty or so small-format collages she had made from her photographs of the estate. Through a play on print, degrees of resolution and chromatic intensity, magnified by the Swarovski crystals that highlight the shapes of the vegetation and the house, she creates an immersive work that transcribes her own experience of the place.

 

Me as Muse
2016
Multimedia video installation shot with Super 8 and HD camera
Courtesy of the artis

In Me as Muse, Thomas challenges the idea of the muse in Western art, through her own body. The artwork combines footages of the artist in the nude, reclining in the pose of an odalisque, with images of emblematic nudes from European art history, of stars such as model Grace Jones, but also of Saartje Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from southwest Africa who was exploited and exhibited at colonial exhibitions across Europe in the 19th century, before dying in Paris in 1815.
Thomas here embodies a resistance to the iconographic hold exerted on Black women’s bodies not only by Western art history, but also by anthropology and centuries of European scientific racism. The soundtrack features a BBC interview with Eartha Kitt (1927–2009) in which the singer speaks candidly about the abuse, suffering and racism she experienced throughout her life.