Mickalene Thomas will unveil Beyond the Pleasure Principle on 9 September 2019 in New York City, the first part of a multi-part exhibition that will take place in the fall of 2021 in four international cities and presents interconnected collections of new works from painting to collage. to installation and video. Over the past 20 years, Thomas has developed a distinctive vocabulary of queer black aesthetics and thinking through his interdisciplinary practice and his often collaborative approach to producing and displaying his work.
Thomas first became interested in dialogue with 19th century progressive artists such as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet after his artistic residency in Monet’s house in Giverny, France in 2011 and incomparing our assumptions about what defines women’s experiences in art and popular culture.
Inspired by the many sources of Romard Bearden, Edouard Manet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Henri Matisse in contemporary cinema, fashion and popular culture, Mikalen Thomas tries to redefine gender, race, and beauty critically through Thomas’ extensive collection of portraits created in a wide variety of environments.
Mikalen Thomas is a Francie Bishop Goode and David Horwitz Art Fellow for US artists in 2015, and has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Her portraits of African American women explore the spectrum of beauty and sexual identity of black women, creating images of femininity and strength.
The first chapter, Better Days, took place during Art Basel 2013 at Galerie Volkhaus in Basel, Switzerland, the installation embodies a living environment conceptually reconstructed in accordance with the interior aesthetics of the time, including faux wood panels, custom paper wallpapers and furniture. Since the places are so different, the exhibition also intended to create the works himself based on the cultural audience and the social and political context currently existing in each city that has made a big impact.
In early September, Thomas launched his latest large-scale paintings, Jet, inspired by vintage photographs from Jet Magazine, known for its central role in the lives of black Americans. 1952 Thomas builds complex portraits, landscapes and interiors to explore how identity, gender and sense of self depend on how women are represented in art and popular culture. Rhinestones, the artist’s signature material and a symbol of femininity, serve as an additional layer of meaning and a metaphor for artificiality.
According to the Financial Times, “proclaiming one’s own appearance and the appearance of other women of color is the essence of Thomas’ practice, which places the black woman body in art history by placing his muses in iconic poses and sets. Her portrayals of African American women explore concepts of celebrity and identity as they relate to representations of black femininity and black power.
For many years Thomas studied art history, portraiture, landscape and still life and this influenced his work. When I recently visited his studio in Brooklyn, Thomas showed a group of collages stacked on a table ordered for Swarovski using the company’s crystals, while his paintings and collages are stunning, bold and seemingly light, they take on unexpected seriousness upon closer inspection.
At the same time, while conveying a message of beauty and emancipation of black women, her compositions reveal a deep knowledge of art history – inspired by artists such as Manet, Matisse, Ingres, Courbet and Romard Bearden. Inspired by art history and popular culture – Thomas cites sources from the 19th century French painting to the 1970 blaxploitation films.
A brief History of Mikalen Thomas 2008 Thomas creates a portrait of the First Lady Michelle Obama, citing Carrie May Wimss’s work in the 1990s at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon as crucial to her becoming an artist.
