The best part about walking into Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, the artist’s major exhibition at the Broad, is, in fact, the first gallery that you walk into. Known for raw photographs and dazzling collages covered in candy-colored sparkles, Thomas’s show begins with the domestic sets that serve as the backdrop for her oeuvre. In one installation, a wood-paneled room straight out of the 1970s or 1980s includes various houseplants, decorative pillows, and cushions upholstered with overlapping textile patterns and quilts. Entering is like stepping back to a time when mirrors covered entire walls and shag carpets engulfed your feet with every step. These living-room installations welcome you into the interior spaces where Black women find their sexualities and desires, where they daydream in leisure after a long day’s work. It’s also a place where they can be vulnerable yet confident, heal and mend.
These are spaces where they love and are loved.
This essay was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
SIGN UP
On view through September 29, All About Love shares its title—and many of its themes—with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks. “Her pioneering work and the way she revolutionized contemporary notions of systemic oppression, in particular, keep fueling the framework of my artistic practice,” Thomas tells me when I talk to her. On view are more than 80 works created over the past 20 years that showcase Thomas’s mastery of every medium she’s worked in: video, painting, collage, installation, and photography.
Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas completed her MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002. She held a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, where she became well-known for large-scale paintings of Black women in repose. Vibrantly colored rhinestones and jewels became key identifiers of a Thomas work; she utilized these adornments to symbolize the complexities of femininity. As a viewer, I can’t help but see these women as familiar. They are aunties and sisters who decorate my own life with their poise and dazzle.
Thomas appears in many of these pieces herself, but she also draws from a host of women, whom she refers to as muses, including her own mother, affectionately known as Mama Bush. “When I began creating my own work in graduate school, I knew I had to start by using my mother as the subject, as a way to understand and explore the representation of the Black body,” Thomas says. “This decision was both personal and complicated, as it forced me to navigate my own self-perception and sense of identity. As a young queer person, I had always idealized my mother’s beauty and sensuality, and this complex dynamic became the foundation of my exploration of desire. By examining my own relationship with my mother’s image, I began to unravel the intricate web of desire, self-love, and identity.”
Desire—both what we have for others and, specifically, the desire to be desired—makes itself seen throughout much of Thomas’s work. Throughout, the artist gives her muses agency to experience eroticism on their own terms. “Desire is the most complex and unpredictable manifestation of love, often leading me to a vulnerable and uncomfortable space, even though my ultimate destination is always love,” she says.
In many of the works in All About Love, Thomas’s muses connect your eyeline with theirs. It is not that you are walking in on them but that Thomas allows you to be a guest to their private celebrations. “Black erotica is everything to me,” Thomas says. “I appreciate women that are not afraid to be vulnerable yet confident and comfortable with their bodies and understand their prowess.”
Thomas’s work has always pushed back against art history, particularly what has been labeled “beautiful” by convention. With each sparkling piece, she interrogates the exclusion of Black and queer people from the Western art canon. Reinterpreting artists like Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso, Thomas appropriates their famous paintings by situating her muses in what can only be their rightful place. On view is Thomas’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe les Trois Femmes Noires d’après Picasso, in which she appropriates Manet’s 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the grass), a work Picasso himself reinterpreted many times. In Manet’s original, a naked woman sits engaged with the viewer as two men carry on a conversation next to her. In Thomas’s version, she portrays all Black women, adorned with her palette of beautiful patterns, their likenesses collaged together. Her muses, all clothed, their hair in various forms of Afro’d Blackness, beckon the viewer. Here are three beautiful women enjoying the leisure of an afternoon picnic. What say you?
Fashion is central to Thomas’s practice. Whether nude or clothed, her muses embody the style and glamour of Black women, from their long acrylic nails to stylish accessories like platinum silver pumps. “I must say, I take great pride in my curated closet, which serves as a treasure trove of inspiration,” Thomas says. “The attire my subjects wear, like other elements in my compositions, blurs the line between reality and imagination. The actual image in front of me and my artistic interpretation often diverge, but that’s what makes it fascinating.”
Accompanying the Broad show has been a variety of public programs that celebrate queer and Black feminist creative practices, each centered around communal care, including therapeutic workshops, a comedy night, screenings of films by LGBTQ directors, and live performances, including that of rapper Flo Milli. All of these events aligned with the profound ways that love transforms us. “Knowing and loving yourself is something I had to learn over time, especially the last few years, when an unexpected, disheartening, and disruptive separation happened. It just made me stronger. That obstacle was the best thing that could have happened to me,” shares Thomas. “I’ll always come back to the place of love, joy, leisure, and celebration, and as an image maker, I have a desire to see positive images in the world.”•
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on view at the Broad through September 29
Shaquille Heath is a writer and essayist who explores the intricacies of Blackness and identity, specifically in the visual arts. Her work has appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, The Cut, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elephant, and elsewhere.
