“I define my work as a feminist and political act… I am Black, Queer and a Woman,” says the American artist Mickalene Thomas. It is a proud declaration, albeit one that might lead some viewers to expect work light on joyousness and heavy on messaging. In fact, the opposite is true: in Thomas’s rhinestone-spattered, patterned and vivid paintings, collages and photographs it is a case of exuberance first and all other concerns can wait.
Her subject is almost exclusively black women – statuesque, afro-haired, and often past the first flush of youth. They are frank and frequently mildly challenging, looking the viewer in the eye and refusing to blink first. Thomas gives them poses taken from white female nudes from the canon, such as Ingres’s orientalist fantasy La Grande Odalisque (1814) with her acreage of buttock and thigh, Manet’s startlingly frank Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-63), and Courbet’s entwined and leg-wrapped The Sleepers (1866).
If the women who modelled for such paintings were looked down upon but still worth looking at, then Thomas’s models – usually friends, family and lovers – are worth looking at now. And this time the male gaze is not so unequivocal: the first and longest looking being that of the artist herself, the gaze, in her own words “of a black woman unapologetically loving other black women”. On one level these paintings are less referential co-optings than satires; on another they are self-portraits. As Thomas told a recent interviewer: “They’re mirror images of how I feel sometimes about myself – my sexy self, my desired self, my vulnerable self, my strong self.”
They are also a homage to the many women who have influenced Thomas, from her mother, Sandra “Mama Bush” Bush – a model who later struggled with drug addiction – to the artist Carrie Mae Weems and the singer Eartha Kitt. Thomas’s credentials as a painter of female agency were further reinforced when her Warholesque Michelle O became the first independent portrait made of Michelle Obama as First Lady.
Thomas has not, however, confined herself to galleries. She has, for example, also collaborated with Dior, designing the stage set for its 2023 couture show as well as a coat and handbag for its collection; she has a partnership with Swarovski crystals; and created an EP cover for Solange. Now, Thomas’s distinctive aesthetic – poppy, merch-friendly on the outside, more layered inside – is on display at the Hayward Gallery in London in a show called “All About Love”.
The title is taken from a work by the feminist writer bell hooks, in which she examines the nature of love in modern society. Thomas herself says that her art comes “from a loving place” and there is indeed a warmth underlying all the works on show, even though many of the paintings are on a grand scale. Nevertheless, they show women in repose, usually in domestic interiors plump with cushions, swathes of material and decorated fabrics. This is a non-confrontational realm, and although there is sensuality in all this soft stuff, what it really represents is the natural habitat of the women at the centre of each mise en scène.
As if to stress the point, there are also two room installations in the exhibition. They sit side by side, one a reimagining of an interior from the late 1970s in which Thomas recalls her childhood in New Jersey and the presence of her grandmother; the other a memory from the 1980s and the sitting room she associates with her mother. These were female spaces where women friends would gather and, says Thomas, “I would be outside, with my ear to the door, trying to be part of the excitement when I should have been upstairs sleeping.”
The message that comes across most strongly in paintings such as A Moment’s Pleasure #2 (2008) is one of self-sufficiency: these women are totally at ease in their plumply overstuffed spaces, sealed off from the wider world and perhaps especially from men.
Only occasionally does the outside intrude. There is one large landscape in the show; the background to her Courbet-inspired Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (2012) includes fragments of river and trees borrowed from another Courbet painting, The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (1856); and there is one text-based, overtly political work in response to the killing of George Floyd and other black people by the police. Otherwise, these are paintings of an enclosed domain, a members-only club where the only rule of entry seems to be a degree of fabulousness.
Thomas says she is “not a figure painter, I’m an image maker” and, refreshingly, she acknowledges many influences: as well as the French 19th-century painters there is cut-and-paste cubism in the backgrounds, the collages of Romare Bearden, and the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. This mixture gives the pictures – despite their fresh feel – a historical perspective. Underlying all the images is photography: Thomas’s starting point is either pictures she has taken herself or archival photographs that she then tweaks. The paintings are given a signature twist by a liberal application of rhinestones.
Thomas started to use rhinestones as an art student when she couldn’t afford oils. They reminded her of Australian Aboriginal dot paintings as well as pointillism, and havebecome a form of gestural mark in her work. She uses them to “push and play with in the same way as paint”. They lend her pictures not only a fitting glitziness but also give a three-dimensionality to surfaces that are usually glossy enamel on panel. These days, she has upgraded to Swarovski crystals rather than craft-store acrylic rhinestones.
The most affecting work in the show is not a painting but a four-screen video work in which Eartha Kitt, in close-up, sings “Angelitos Negros”: “You paint all our churches,/And fill them with beautiful angels,/But you never do remember,/To paint us a black angel”. Here, Thomas channels the art-mimic Cindy Sherman and, with two other friends, impersonates Kitt – bobbed wig, black polo neck – and lip-synchs along, real tears in her eyes, faces full of yearning. The riotousness of Thomas’s paintings means they can be looked at simply as images. In this work, as the singer implores the unnamed artist to paint black angels, there is no mistaking that Thomas wants her real women – and by extension herself – to be seen too.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
Hayward Gallery, London SE1. Until 5 May
[See also: The inattention pandemic]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone