The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD
April 25 – 28, 2024
Multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas’ portraits critically deconstruct accepted definitions of beauty, race, and gender, specifically in relation to black women. Known for her monumental, rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and female subjects, Thomas identifies photography as playing a central role within her practice. She first began to photograph herself and her mother during her time as an MFA student at Yale and has since moved to photographing friends and lovers.
Drawing from diverse sources, including the nudes of Edouard Manet and the 1970s black-is-beautiful movement, Thomas expands the representation of black women within the canon of art history. The artist emphasizes the collaborative nature of her creative process, through which the unique beauty and individuality of each model is manifested. Appearing in elaborately decorated interiors, often gazing directly into the camera, Thomas’s muses exude a powerful sense of self-possession, through which she also aims to embolden her viewers.
Thomas’ latest series of mixed media photo collages were inspired by her research into the imagery of Black female erotica featured in the calendars of Jet magazine and the pages of the 1950s French publication, Nus Exotique. She further explores the notion of desire, memory, sexuality, and transformation through images of familiar, yet anonymous women, positioned and posed as alluring beauties.
Throughout her career, Thomas has combined abstraction and figuration, and pushed the conventions of painting, photography, collage, and printmaking beyond their traditional limits, often incorporating unconventional materials in her work. In her recent series of photocollages, printed directly on metal using the dye sublimation process, individual elements of each work are cut out and layered one on top of another creating a dimensional surface. On top of the printed imagery, Thomas has added gestural drawings highlighted by her characteristic glittering multi-colored rhinestones. The result is a dynamic three-dimensional construction that undercuts any narrative reading and draws attention to the fluidity of identity, collectiveness of culture, and malleability of history in modern society.
Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971, Thomas lives and works in New York City. She earned her BFA in painting at Pratt Institute in 2000 and her MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002. Her work has been exhibited worldwide at significant institutions including Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris; National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Aperture Foundation, New York; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; George Eastman House, Rochester; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Santa Monica Museum of Art; and La Conservera Contemporary Art Centre, Ceuti, Spain among others.
Thomas’s work is in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The International Center of Photography, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; MoMA PS1, New York; Yale University Art Collection and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.
Thomas has been awarded multiple prizes and grants. Most recently an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2018) and a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015); the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Appraisers Association of America, Award for Excellence in the Arts, (2019); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); Visionary Award, Pioneer Works (2019). In 2021 the first comprehensive monograph on Mickalene Thomas was published by Phaidon with text by Roxane Gay and Kellie Jones.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love opens at The Broad
May 25 – September 29, 2024
Mickalene Thomas's new exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is now open at The Broad in Los Angeles. Co-organized with Hayward Gallery, London and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, this marks Thomas's first major international touring exhibition. Including over 80 works made in the last 20 years, the exhibition showcases the artist’s multidisciplinary practice celebrating and exploring themes of Black feminist empowerment, memory, and themes of love. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Thomas offers a reverberating demand for Black women to be seen and understood, and for viewers to become what the feminist author Bell Hooks calls “practitioners of love.”
May 17, 2023
A new scholarship honouring Mickalene Thomas will support MFA students at Yale
In honour of the influential artist Mickalene Thomas, the collectors Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi, Jr, have endowed a scholarship at the Yale School of Art to provide tuition assistance for an exceptional incoming MFA student each year. As part of the Mickalene Thomas Scholarship, the artist has committed to personally mentoring the recipients throughout their time in the two-year programme.
January 24, 2023
Mickalene Thomas designs the set for Dior's Josephine Baker-inspired Spring/Summer 2023 Haute Couture show
Mickalene Thomas created the stage design that served as the backdrop for Dior’s latest haute couture show, which debuted in Paris this week.
The luxury house’s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, had been the one to ask the New York–based artist to take on the project, which was revealed on Tuesday. It was part of an ongoing effort by Chiuri to bring on established women artists as runway collaborators. Chiuri has previously worked with artists like Judy Chicago, Anna Paparatti, and Eva Jospin, even enlisting the historical work of the Surrealist painter Leonor Fini in one show.
Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet
October 13, 2022- February 6, 2023
Mickalene Thomas has cultivated a distinct visual vocabulary of Black erotica, Black sexuality, and Black queer aesthetics centered around leisure, joy and thought. For this exhibition, Thomas has created three new large-scale collages, one monumental painting and an immersive site-specific installation featuring her 2016 video/sculpture Me As Muse. These works represent the breadth of the visual language the artist has developed over the past twenty years while also revisiting the time she spent as an artist-in-residence at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France in 2011.
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, September 10, 2021 - January 9, 2022
The exhibition showcases and celebrates the remarkable achievements of an impressive roster of women artists who have graduated from Yale University. Presented on the occasion of two major milestones—the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it opened in 1869—the exhibition features works drawn entirely from the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery that span a variety of media, such as paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, and video.
Plural Possibilites & the Female Body, Winter 2021
This exhibition features works by over twenty artists from the Henry’s collection alongside select loans from Seattle collections. It is presented as part of the Henry’s participation in the Feminist Art Coalition, a nation-wide initiative that seeks to generate cultural awareness about feminist thought, experience, and action. The exhibition locates the feminist pursuits of bodily autonomy and self-determination in solidarity with racial and sexual difference and encourages us to consider the possibilities of the individual and collective female body when freed from bounded limitations.
Mickalene Thomas: Better Nights
December 1, 2019 - September 27, 2021
Inspired by the local New Jersey play ‘Put a Little Sugar in my Bowl’ organized and performed by the artists’ mother, friends, and family as well as the parties hosted by the artist’s mother in the late 1970s, Mickalene Thomas: Better Nights is an installation that will transform the galleries into an immersive art experience for the duration of the exhibition.
Better Nights will present a schedule of programming arranged by the artist, including live performances, concerts, activations, a live bar and appearances by guest DJs. The first chapter, Better Days, took place at the Galerie Volkhaus in Basel, Switzerland during Art Basel 2013.
May 24 - July 11, 2019
Orlando, an exhibition guest curated by Tilda Swinton
For the summer 2019 issue of Aperture and a coinciding exhibition, Swinton, as guest editor and curator, draws upon the central themes of the novel—gender fluidity, consciousness without limits, and the deep perspective of a long life—to offer a collection of images and writings that celebrate openness, curiosity, and human possibility. “Woolf wrote Orlando,” Swinton notes, “in an attitude of celebration of the oscillating nature of existence. She believed the creative mind to be androgynous. I have come to see Orlando far less as being about gender than about the flexibility of the fully awake and sensate spirit. This issue of Aperture will be a salute to indetermination and limitlessness, and a heartfelt celebration of the fully inclusive and expansive vision of life exemplified by the extraordinary artists collected here.”
November 29, 2018 – March 24, 2019
Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires
This exhibition, developed in a creative partnership between the AGO and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, presents a bold collection of Thomas’s vibrant and politically charged paintings, silkscreens, photographs, time-based media and site-specific installations exploring how black women are represented in art and popular culture. The exhibition also highlights Thomas’s collage work and the inspiration she takes from art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada and the Harlem Renaissance.
October 24, 2018 – February 10, 2019
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today
A sweeping re-examination of the history of modern art at the Wallach, located in Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts on 125th Street west of Broadway, the exhibition presents more than 100 works of art from the mid-19th century to today, on loan from more than 40 public and private collections. Created by artists from Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Matisse to Romare Bearden, and Mickalene Thomas, the works show how the representation of the black female figure has been central to the development of art for the past 150 years. Posing Modernity is co-organized by the Wallach and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Columbia’s presentation is curated by Denise Murrell, the Wallach’s Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar.
October 20, 2018 – January 13, 2019
Muse: Mickalene Thomas and tete-a-tete
Mickalene Thomas challenges current standards and asserts new definitions of beauty and inspiration through her groundbreaking photographs. Identifying photography as a touchstone for her practice, much of Thomas' work functions as an act of deconstruction and appropriation - she draws inspiration widely, borrowing various visual motifs, including 1970s black-is-beautiful imagery, 19th-century French painting, and 20th-century studio portraiture. Communities of inspiration are further highlighted in tête-à-tête, a companion presentation curated by Thomas. This mini-exhibition within Muse includes works by 10 artists that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own practice, these works contain many of the same themes central to Thomas’ images. Artists include Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zanele Muholi, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
July 24 - September 30, 2018
MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête
This exhibition and its accompanying publication are the first to gather together Thomas’ various approaches to photography, including chromogenic color prints, collages, and Polaroids. The exhibition also includes a reconstruction of the artist’s studio, a tableau depicted in many of the photographs. tête-à-tête, is an installation curated by Thomas of work from photographers and key images that have inspired her. This includes work from older generations of artists as well as more contemporary artists who are part of her generation or younger, and may in turn find inspiration in Thomas’ own practice. Artists include Derrick Adams, Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.
February 15 - May 13, 2018
Figuring History
Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas brings together three generations of contemporary American artists, whose work challenges a Western painting tradition that underrepresents people of color. The vibrant and monumental paintings by these artists offer bold perspectives on Black culture and representation. Presented together for the first time, the figurative paintings of Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas are shaped by distinctive historic events, unique in style, and united in questioning the narratives of history through Black experience.
September 27, 2017 - January 21, 2018
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” investigates gender’s place in contemporary art and culture at a moment of political upheaval and renewed culture wars. The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists who explore gender beyond the binary to usher in more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity.
