Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971) is an African-American contemporary visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender. She was raised by her mother Sandra "Mama Bush" Bush, who, at 6'1" tall, modeled in the 1970s. She exposed Mickalene and her brother to art by enrolling them in after-school programs at the Newark Museum, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York. Thomas' mother raised her and her brother Buddhists. As a teenager, Mickalene and her mother had a very intimate and strenuous relationship due to her parents' addiction to drugs and Thomas dealing with her sexuality, which she documented in the short film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother.

Thomas lived and attended school in Portland, Oregon, from the mid-1980s to the early '90s, studying pre-law and Theater Arts. Thomas received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2002. Thomas participated in a residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York from 2000 to 2003. She also participated in a residency in Giverny, France at the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artwork, style, and influences

During her early career, she found herself immersed in the growing culture of DIY artists and musicians, leading her to start her own body of work. Mickalene noted that when she became an artist, fashion was always "in the back of my mind" as a source of inspiration. Weems' work not only played a role in Mickalene Thomas' decision to switch studies and apply to Pratt Institute in New York but in her using her experience and turning it into art. Thomas has also stated that Faith Ringgold provided a strong influencing in establishing Thomas' path.

Her depictions of African-American women explore notions of celebrity and identity while engaging with the representation of black femininity and black power. Inhabiting the '70s-style genre of Blaxploitation, the subjects in Thomas's paintings and collages radiate sexuality, which has been interpreted by some as satire of misogynistic and racist tropes in media, including films and music associated with the Blaxploitation genre. as in Left Behind 2 Again from 2012, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Her subjects are often well-known women like Eartha Kitt, Whitney Houston, Oprah Winfrey, and Condoleezza Rice. Her portrait of Michelle Obama was the first individual portrait done of the First Lady and was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery's Americans Now show.

In her 2017 solo exhibition "Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities" at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), Thomas created multi-media installations that centered black women in the narrative-arcs of their own stories. According to art critic Rikki Byrd: "Positioning black women — artists, actresses, characters, and her own family — as mentors and muses, and as heroic figures in a lineage of their own, Thomas overrides oppressive narratives."

The many years that Thomas has spent studying art history, portrait painting, landscape painting, and still life has informed her work. She has drawn inspiration from multiple artistic periods and cultural influences throughout Western art history, particularly the early modernists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet as well as more contemporary influences such as Romare Bearden and Pam Grier. She models her figures on the classical poses and abstract settings popularized by these modern artists as a way to reclaim agency for women who have been represented as objects to be desired or subjugated. Additionally, a personal source of inspiration in Thomas’ life was her mother, Sandra Bush, who was a fashion model at a point in time.

Thomas is known for her elaborate mixed-media paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel that present a "complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty." Rhinestones serve as an added layer of meaning and a metaphor for artifice. Rhinestones accentuate specific elements of each painting, while subtly confronting our assumptions of what is feminine and what defines a woman, specifically black women. According to the Financial Times, "Proclaiming her own visibility and that of other women of colour is at the heart of Thomas's practice, which inserts the black female body into art history by placing her muses in iconic poses and settings." Thomas, and curators of her work, see Thomas's status as a black lesbian as part of what makes her gaze different from that of white male artists in history.

Thomas's work is also distinctive in its foregrounding of queer identity; she is a queer woman of color representing women of color in a way that emphasizes their agency and erotic beauty. By emphasizing the women's striking presence and sensuality along with their assertive gazes, Thomas empowers these subjects, representing them as resilient, stunning women who command the spectator's attention. The sitters have the control and power of the gaze, and when this exchange is between women, it subverts the traditional dominance of the male gaze in art and visual culture. Thomas's queer identity is foregrounded, for example, in her painting and print edition entitled Sleep: Deux femmes noires (2012 and 2013), in which we see two female bodies intertwined in an embrace, on a sofa, thus highlighting for her audience the femininity, beauty, and sexuality of women lovers.

Thomas has collaborated with the fashion house Dior on several occasions. Including designing handbags and her own design of the classic Dior Bar Jacket.

Thomas' work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Le Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires is a painting created by African-American visual artist Mickalene Thomas. The title of the painting translates from French as The luncheon on the grass: The Three Black Women. The painting is a contemporary take on Édouard Manet's 1863 painting entitled . Thomas' piece portrays three black women adorned with rich colors, vintage patterned clothing, and radiant Afro-styled hair. The women's positioning and posing is reminiscent of the subjects of Manet's piece, but the powerful gazes of all three women are fixed on the viewer.

Description was created in three stages. First, Thomas photographed three models in the sculpture garden of the MoMA to make the piece "site-specific". The third, painted version was based on the original photograph but composed of collage-like painted segments on wood panels and rendered in acrylic, oil, enamel, and rhinestones.

The painting stands 10 feet tall and extends 24 feet wide. In addition to these explicit allusions, , along with many of Thomas' other pieces, is inspired by Dada, cubism, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Response The majority of critical responses to address the piece's interaction with post-black and post-feminist ideas.

Thomas' work has received criticism common of post-black art claiming that, through the overtly sensual representation of her subjects, she is reveling "in the glittery spoils of success at the expense of meaningful social engagement." and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Portrait of an Unlikely Space Portrait of an Unlikely Space is an exhibition co-organized by Mickalene Thomas that was on display at the Yale University Art Gallery from September 8, 2023, to January 7, 2024. The multi-gallery installation depicts domestic surroundings reminiscent of a moment in U.S. history that had never before been explicitly represented in her work: the pre-Emancipation era. The exhibition featured a selection of early American portraits of Black women, men, and children—from miniatures and daguerreotypes to silhouettes on paper and engravings in books—hanging on walls, standing within cases, and resting atop furniture. Alongside these small-scale objects, a group of artworks by Thomas and other contemporary artists in a wide array of media were situated within a homelike environment.

All About Love In 2025 Thomas' most recent exhibition titled All About Love will begin to travel between three sites. It begins at The Broad in Los Angeles and will travel to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and end at the Hayward Gallery in London. The exhibition travel too in Les Abattoirs, a museum in Toulouse.

Film, music, and video art In addition to her paintings, the Brooklyn-based Thomas works in the mediums of photography, collage, printmaking, video art, sculpture and installation art. Her works, in particular the Odalisque series (2007), have been interpreted as "investigating the artist-model relationship [...] but from an updated perspective of female inter-subjectivity and same-sex desire." (La Leçon d'amour, 2008) She has restaged themes and symbolism with a long lineage in Western art in her references to the odalisque representation of women in exotic settings. She experimented with institutional images in FBI/Serial Portraits (2008), based on mug shots of African-American women. In 2012, Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, her first major solo museum exhibition, opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum. This show, the title of which references Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting , showcased a series of recent portraits, landscapes and interiors.

Thomas has collaborated with musician Solange, creating the cover art for her 2013 EP True. The cover began as a portrait of Solange the artist herself commissioned. Thomas and Solange also collaborated on a trailer for the music video for the song "Losing You."

Her short film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, created for her exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, is about Sandra Bush, her mother and longtime muse. In it, Sandra talks about careers, relationships, beauty, and her fatal illness. The film made its television debut on HBO on February 24, 2014, and has run regularly since.

Commissions In 2019, Rolls-Royce auctioned a custom-designed Phantom luxury car at Sotheby's to benefit the global AIDS-eradication charity (RED); the winning bidder had the opportunity to decorate the vehicle with a unique wrap made by Thomas.

In 2020, Thomas designed a version of Dior's signature 1947 bar jacket for a cruise collection show held in Marrakesh.

For Dior's haute couture show at the Musée Rodin in January 2023, the brand's creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri commissioned Thomas to create the stage design that served as the show's backdrop. Mounted on the walls surrounding the museum's runway floor were collaged black and white images of 13 Black and mixed-race female performers, including Josephine Baker, Diahann Carroll, Marpessa Dawn, Lena Horne, and Nina Simone. Their images, which were overlaid with pink and yellow forms, featured embroidered details produced by the Mumbai-based artisan group Chanakya ateliers and the Chanakya School of Craft. MoCADA Artistic Advocacy Award (2015), AICA-USA Best Show in a Commercial Space Nationally, First Place (2014), Audience Award: Favorite Short, Second Annual Black Star Film Festival (2013), Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012), Timehri Award for Leadership in the Arts (2010), Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2009), Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award (2009) and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2007). In 2026, Thomas received the Torchbearer "Carrying Change" Awards' Legend Award.

Thomas has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine (2013) (resident faculty); Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program, Giverny, France (2011); Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado (2010) (painting faculty); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2003); Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont (2001); and Yale Norfolk Summer of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut (1999).

Notable works in public collections

Panthera (2002), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Instant Gratification (from Brawling Spitfire Wrestling series) (2005), Rubell Museum, Miami/Washington, D.C. Rumble (from Brawling Spitfire Wrestling series) (2005), Art Institute of Chicago Mama Bush II, Keep the Home Fires Burnin' (2006), Rubell Museum, Miami/Washington, D.C. Remember Me (2006), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut Can't We Just Sit Down and Talk It Over? (2006–2007), Art Institute of Chicago; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007), Brooklyn Museum, New York Lovely Six Foota (2007), International Center of Photography, New York Madame Mama Bush in Black and White (2007), Brooklyn Museum, New York Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Oprah Winfrey (2007–2008), National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Din Avec la Main Dans le Miroir (2008), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Michelle O (2008), Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. A Moment's Pleasure in Black and White (2008), Whitney Museum, New York Portrait of Qusuquzah (2008), Minneapolis Institute of Art A-E-I-O-U and Sometimes Y (2009), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. Ain't I A Woman (Keri) (2009), Museum of Modern Art, New York I Learned the Hard Way (2010), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2010), Baltimore Museum of Art Portrait of Mnonja (2010), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need (2010), Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio Melody: Back (2011), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Qusuquzah, une très belle négresse 1 (2011), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Portrait of Marie Sitting in Black and White (2012), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (2013), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Hair Portrait #20 (2014), Seattle Art Museum Racquel: Come to Me (2016), Whitney Museum, New York Resist #2 (2021), Baltimore Museum of Art Guernica (Resist #3) (2021), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Personal life Thomas is an out lesbian.