LOS ANGELES — So many of Mickalene Thomas’s artworks are beautiful objects. This feels entirely appropriate given that they are, among other things, meditations on and appreciations of Black female beauty and sexuality. And you can see it across the bodies of work that comprise her mid-career survey, All About Love, currently at The Broad.
Rooted in collage, the works refract, layer, and interrupt themselves, transitioning from black and white imagery to saturated acrylics and enamels to rhinestone tracings to photographic prints. The abrupt shifts in these glittering surfaces seem to ask viewers to consider all that lies beneath — the self-fashioning of her subjects (most of whom she has depicted multiple times over the years), the formation and deconstruction of Black American aesthetics, quotidian acts of resistance shaped by a refusal to assimilate to White culture, the recent surge in interest in Black figuration and portraiture, and the reframing of art historical subjects.
As a subject of artistic inquiry, beauty can feel outdated, something that was of far more interest to artists of bygone eras. And yet, it remains an obsession across cultures: cosmetics is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States, and social media influencers in beauty and fashion take up the most space by far in the world’s feeds. Thomas’s work is a direct and personal response to European and North American histories of denying the humanity and beauty of Black women and exoticizing and fetishizing their bodies, as well as to the ways that the Eurocentric art histories that have long dominated many American institutions and museums have reinforced those same behaviors. For instance, the title of the work “Din, une très belle négresse #2 (A Very Beautiful Black Girl)” (2012), is a reference to French painter Édouard Manet. In his notebooks, Manet used the phrase “une très belle négresse” to describe Laure, a model he depicted often, most famously as a maid in the painting “Olympia” (1863). Elsewhere, Thomas invokes artists such as Courbet, Picasso, and Ingres, riffing on, reclaiming, and refashioning their portrayals of women, countering their gaze with that of a Black queer woman.
With all of the above in mind, it’s notable that Thomas has engaged directly with the fashion industry through collaborations with brands such as Dior and Brother Vellies, and photo shoots for W Magazine and Essence, among other publications. Her mother, the late Sandra “Mama Bush” Bush, one of the artist’s most potent and poignant muses, was herself a fashion model. And a recent series engages with female nudes from both Jet magazine, a news and culture weekly for Black American audiences that was in print from 1951 to 1999, and the 1950s French magazine Nus Exotiques, published by gallerist and photographer Paul Facchetti. Just as her paper collage pieces gather clippings from multiple sources, likely including magazine pages, she seems interested in placing her own art in the more readily available lexicon of image- and self-making. In a society where identity formation is a cultural obsession, and is intimately linked to perceptions of beauty and stylishness, it is unsurprising that her work not only traverses art, fashion, and popular culture, but that it is connected to each of them at its core.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love continues at The Broad (221 South Grand Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles) through September 29. This iteration of the exhibition was curated by Ed Schad.
