Mickalene Thomas
- Born:
- January 28, 1971, Camden, New Jersey, U.S.
Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971, Camden, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American mixed-media artist best known for portraits of Black women that are often made from nontraditional media, such as rhinestones, glitter, and yarn. She also works in collage, video, sculpture, and installations. Thelma Golden—the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where Thomas had a residency (2002–03)—described Thomas’s work to ARTnews in 2011: “She simultaneously reinvents and pays tribute to centuries of artistic depictions of women as she draws on an astonishing and inspired range of esthetic, historical, and social references. Her work is viciously smart, audaciously sexy, and incredibly beautiful to look at.”
Early life and influences
Thomas and her elder brother, Paul, were raised in New Jersey by their mother, Sandra Bush, after their parents divorced. Bush was a former fashion model and later became a major influence on Thomas’s work. She frequently kept such magazines as Ebony and Jet in the house, and Thomas told The Washington Post in 2022 that the periodicals’ glamorous, stylish, powerful Black women informed her understanding of beauty and success. Other influences that shaped Thomas’s creativity include films starring Pam Grier as a powerful female character. As a child Thomas attended after-school programs at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, and she went to nearby museums with her mother and brother. In these places Thomas saw the work of such artists as Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and the painters who belonged to the Hudson River school. This art later inspired her own.
After graduating from high school, Thomas moved to Portland, Oregon, with her then girlfriend. She enrolled at Portland State University to study prelaw and theater arts. While there, Thomas found herself surrounded by a community of young artists and musicians who encouraged her to draw. She also learned about the work of Black artists William H. Johnson and Romare Bearden. While visiting the Portland Art Museum, Thomas saw a show of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Kitchen Table Series. “It was the first time I saw contemporary art in a museum that reflected who I was. That was the moment that I knew I wanted to become an artist, ” Thomas told Whoopi Goldberg in Interview magazine in 2021.
Art education
Thomas returned to the East Coast to attend the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. As a student she often lacked the resources to buy traditional art materials such as oil paint, so she instead sought supplies at craft stores. She began using unconventional materials, namely yarn, rhinestones, sequins, and glitter—items she felt connected her work to women’s crafts. During her undergraduate studies, Thomas also began photographing models to use as reference for her paintings; the photography then became part of her artistic output. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt in 2000, Thomas went on to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, graduating in 2002.
Portraits of powerful Black women
Thomas then began her residency at the Studio Museum, creating such works as Panthera (2002), a depiction of a panther done entirely in rhinestones. Her art was shown in group exhibitions in 2005 at the Studio Museum and at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, and her first solo shows were held in 2006 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and in 2007 at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. In 2007 she created portraits in rhinestones of two powerful Black women, talk show host and entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (When Ends Meet). In 2008 she made the first individual portrait of Michelle Obama (who became the U.S. first lady early the following year), a screen print on paper entitled Michelle O for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Thomas was also commissioned by the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program to create a piece for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. The result was the full-length Portrait of Mnonja (2010), showing a glamorous Black woman reclining confidently on a patterned couch.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires and other works inspired by art history
In 2011 Thomas participated in the Versailles Foundation Munn Artist Program, in which she was an artist-in-residence at Impressionist Claude Monet’s home and garden in Giverny, France. About this time she also created a few of her best-known works—those that draw upon art history. The photograph Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires (2010) recreates Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe but with three Black women sitting confidently on patterned fabric. The large-scale photo was the result of a 2009 photo shoot in the iconic sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas returned to the subject many times in her career, including as a collage and as an acrylic and rhinestone painting. In 2022 she recreated Monet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which itself reconstructed Manet’s earlier, more daring painting. The Washington Post noted that in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires avec Monet, “instead of ivory-skinned picnickers and sunbathers, [Thomas] positions Black women in their glory, with brown skin and Afros. They look back at the viewer. They aren’t staking a claim on a White world; they’re inhabiting their own realm, one in which Monet exists but over which they have authority. They’re at ease and self-satisfied.”
Videos, installations, and other works
Other works building off art history include Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two (2009) and Marie: femme noire nue couchée (2012), which rework the classic reclining nude from such paintings as La Grande Odalisque (1814) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) by Giorgione. Mama Bush depicts Thomas’s mother, who sat for the artist on many occasions before her death in 2012, including for the short film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother (2012). Another of Thomas’s videos, Do I Look like a Lady? (2016), uses clips of Black female entertainers to explore themes of beauty and how it is projected and viewed.
Thomas also has created a number of installation pieces, including Better Days at the Volkshaus Galerie in Basel, Switzerland, during the 2013 Art Basel fair. The immersive environment was inspired by the parties her mother threw in the 1970s and featured decor and music from that era, along with paintings by Thomas and other Black artists. The art piece also included DJ sets and performances by such singers as Solange. Thomas restaged the work at the Bass Museum during the 2019 Art Basel fair in Miami Beach, Florida. In 2023 Thomas produced a multigallery installation, Portrait of an Unlikely Space, at the Yale University Art Gallery. She created spaces resembling a living room around rare portraits of African Americans, including a watercolor-on-ivory miniature of a Black woman named Rose Prentice by artist Sarah Goodridge that the museum acquired in 2016.
Other projects and collections
Outside of her own art practice, Thomas cofounded Pratt>FORWARD, a mentorship program at the Pratt Institute that teaches business strategies to emerging artists. With her long-term partner, collector Racquel Chevremont, Thomas founded Deux Femmes Noires, an organization helping artists, particularly women of color and queer women, in their careers. The couple separated in 2020. Thomas’s work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago.