Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2002. She has described being transformed by seeing Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series at the Portland Art Museum — the first work of contemporary art, she said, that reflected her own identity. She makes large, labor-intensive paintings built from photographs she takes of models in staged domestic interiors, then reproduced in acrylic, enamel, and rhinestones on wood panels. The rhinestones are not decorative in a simple sense. They come from craft stores, from women's traditions, from the aesthetic cultures that the fine art tradition has consistently devalued. Applied to the surfaces of paintings making arguments about canonical art history, they make the surface active, refusing to settle into the passive object the viewer expects. Her sources are deliberate and explicit. She draws from Manet, Matisse, Ingres, and Courbet — the tradition of the reclining nude and the Impressionist scandal. She draws from the 1970s Black-is-beautiful movement, from blaxploitation films, from the photographs in Jet and Ebony that gave Black American women a visual culture in which their beauty was centered. She draws from her mother, Sandra Bush, a former fashion model who sat for her repeatedly before her death in 2012. The reclining nude is the most direct engagement. Marie: femme noire nue couchée reworks Ingres's Grande Odalisque and Giorgione's Sleeping Venus with a Black female subject. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires takes Manet's scandalous picnic and replaces its white figures with Black women, fully present, gazes direct. The argument is precise: the Western canon built its tradition of the female nude almost entirely around white bodies. Thomas places Black women inside those conventions intact, which reveals the exclusion by showing what the tradition would have looked like if it had been paying attention all along. Her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2012, its title referencing Courbet's L'Origine du monde. Her work is held by MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, and numerous other major institutions. She painted the first individual portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008.

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