With a world tour now on the way, Mickalene Thomas talks to Mission about her art, working with tactile mediums.
To experience Mickalene Thomas’s work is to be immersed in colorful, controlled chaos. Her collages envelop you. Her subjects are wrapped in patterns and textiles and jewels, stitched in and committed to canvas repeatedly alongside red and cerulean hues. Your eyes stick to the surfaces like they’re glued. You can get lost. There are endless angles to explore.
At the center of her work, there is almost always an essential subject, and that subject is almost always a Black woman. Oftentimes, the subject’s gaze is fixed straight ahead. They seem to look right at you, sturdy, addressing you directly amid the avalanche of abstraction. In many of the canvases, there is a Mona Lisa quality to their expressions. The slight lift of an eyebrow. The subtle curve of a mouth. An invitation for interpretation. And that’s just how Thomas intended it to be.
“I want people to get whatever they want from the work,” she says. “We bring our own associations and experiences to everything we come into contact with.” In other words, Thomas doesn’t want to interfere with the natural process of appreciating art, where people’s individual sensibilities and learned histories often contribute to their understanding of a piece. It’s impossible not to project the personal onto the painting, no matter the artist.
If anything, Thomas hopes to incite “familiarity” within the viewer, inviting them to investigate the canvases further through forming a personal connection to the work. “I want them to see themselves enough that they want to celebrate the art,” she says. “I want people to feel a sense of inspiration, love, and desire as they look at the work, because that’s what I put into it.”
Over the next year, people all over the world will have the opportunity to experience Thomas’s work up close, with her internationally touring show, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, taking place at The Broad in Los Angeles (until September 29), the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025), and the Hayward Gallery in London (February 10–May 5, 2025). At the shows many of Thomas’s favorite works will be on view, including Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003), Portrait of Maya No. 10 (2017), and Angelitos Negros (2016).
“The exhibition will explore how Thomas’s art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while subverting common notions of beauty, sexuality, fame, and more,” says Rachel Thomas, chief curator at the Hayward Gallery. Additional touring venues are to be confirmed soon, too, bringing the artist’s renowned style of multidisciplinary portraiture to an even wider global audience.
“This is an incredible opportunity to bring the work to people who may not have been in close proximity to it. They can actually see how the work is made outside of a reproduction,” Mickalene says. These exhibitions will allow people to get up close to the works, see their tactile qualities, and even “have the impetus to want to touch it, when they know they can’t.” She wants viewers to let their emotions come through “spiritually, emotionally, and physically,” as they examine her work.
All About Love is influenced by 19th-century paintings, popular culture, and Black feminist scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins. The show is also largely inspired by its namesake: the late writer bell hooks’ transgressive book All About Love: New Visions, originally published in 1999. Among other things, the book interrogates our societal reverence for romantic love to get “at the truth of love and what love encompasses,” Thomas says, whether that love is familial or romantically intimate.
hooks asserts that “love is an action, not a noun,” Thomas continues. Above all, by expanding society’s definitions of love, we can heal many aspects of human suffering. And because most of the subjects in her paintings are friends, family members, and lovers, “what [hooks] writes about in All About Love is synonymous to me and the complexities of my work,” Thomas says. “It’s a validation and an affirmation for how one can change someone’s heart and mind.”
Ultimately, Thomas says, inciting transformation in the viewer is the goal of most artists. “We create and we bring an idea to the world to make people feel and see something that is perhaps new to them. That can inspire and create impact,” she believes, no matter the artistic medium. For Thomas, that medium is painting, though her visual art is complicated by the addition of the three-dimensional: acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones that outline a subject like thick, glittering Sharpie.
“The textiles and textures I use in my work are really a way of decoding and deconstructing a space, creating a cacophony of movement that makes the viewer feel a little displaced,” Thomas says. By the time an observer settles on the central figure of the work, “they feel a sense of peace and ease,” she says. Her work is like staring at one flower only to step back and realize you’re sitting in a lush botanic garden. There are so many places to look closely. And figuring out where to start is one of the best parts.
In many ways, this visceral sense of play is a nod to history and quilt-making as a form of storytelling and expression. “When you think of quilt-making, especially for African Americans, you think of them patching together their journey, their lineage, a piece of cloth that’s been passed down to them that gives them the narrative of who they are,” Thomas says. And while this history may be fraught, often complicated and ripped apart, “we still find ways of putting it together to make sense of ourselves.”
Through her work Thomas also explores the concept of erotica. Specifically, she’s interested in women being “liberated enough to express themselves sexually and not feel ashamed about it.” As a result, there are nods to sensual queer pleasure in her work, although embodying the queer gaze “is not the theoretical mode that I need for the viewer to pull from or connect to” when viewing her pieces, she says.
In short, a queer gaze is present in her work, but it’s not an essential takeaway that someone needs to get from their experience with her art. “Instinctually I feel like it’s going to inevitably have that sensibility because that’s who I am, and the art is an extension of myself,” Thomas says. If expressed in the final product, the queer gaze comes through in the collage and portraiture itself, rather than being a message Thomas is trying to convey.
When it comes to queer artists earlier in their careers, though, Thomas says that people should “break out of their own comfort zones” and that they shouldn’t be afraid to cast a wide net when it comes to applying for grants, residencies, and exhibitions that could support their work. An advocate for emerging artists, Thomas works with the Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts department to run Pratt>FORWARD, a program pairing early-career artists with leaders in the art world for professional development, studio space, funding, community-building opportunities, and more.
“There’s so much accessibility for many types of artists right now, especially for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists. The more you put yourself and your work in front of people, the better chance you
have of people knowing your name,” Thomas says of what she would advise younger artists. Sometimes this might even mean being willing to be “the only one in a space,” she says. “I’m okay being the only one, because that gives me the opportunity to change people’s minds.”
And as soon as she gets an opportunity? She opens the door for other artists. “And the floodgate opens quickly,” she says. “I may be the only one at the table, but I’ve already got people right behind me ready to come in.”
All images courtesy of Mickalene Thomas. Homepage page image, Jet Blue #43, 2021. Color photograph, mixed media paper, acrylic paint, rhinestones, fiberglass mesh on museum paper mounted on dibond. 66.625 x 53.875 in. Above left, January 1976 2019. Rhinestones and acrylic paint on canvas, mounted on wood panel with rubbed white mahogany frame 98 x 86 x 3 in. Above right, Tête de Femme #3 2019 Mixed paper crystal fabric collage with rhinestones. 27 x 23 x 1 in.
