For more than two decades, Mickalene Thomas has explored Black femininity through a variety of media: painting, photography, drawing, video, and installation. Arguably her most striking images, however, are her collages—rhinestones, acrylic, paper, and enamel layered with figures cut out from her own studio photographs, vintage Jet magazine calendars, or other archival images. Whether reimagining the subjects of a classic painting (her Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires at once celebrates and challenges Édouard Manet) or coyly cropping and covering found photographs (as in her NUS Exotiques series), Thomas uses glitter, vibrant patterns, and surprising textures to place Black women at the center of her work.
Thomas was born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey. While pursuing an MFA at Yale, she began taking carefully staged photographs of both herself and her mother, a former fashion model. These she later remixed into multilayered collage portraits. All About Love—Thomas’s first major international tour (named for a 1999 book by the Black feminist and social activist bell hooks)—brings to The Broad in Los Angeles a cross section of her work. “To truly love,” hooks wrote, “we must learn to mix various ingredients.” For Thomas, these ingredients include art history, Black resistance, the female gaze, elements of fashion, and her own identity and history. She invites viewers to linger in her colorful spaces, subverting their understanding of what it means to see and be seen.
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