Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Glittering, shimmering, dazzling: Thomas’s eye-catching works have more to them than meets the eye, speaking of Otherness and institutional racism, but also offering a complex and empowering vision of Black womanhood

Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel, 60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Hayward Gallery, London
11 February – 5 May 2025

by ANNA McNAY

I love it when I walk into a gallery and my first response to an exhibition is a surge of joy and a smile. It is a relatively rare occurrence, but the Hayward has managed it with its current exhibition, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. The artist, who describes her gaze as that “of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women”,¹ exudes this “unapologetic loving” in her large-scale, full-colour portraits of lovers and friends, herself and her mother, part-painted, part-screen-printed, part-collaged, part-diamante rhinestones. The outcome is a room full of dazzling ladies, in shimmering dresses, wearing glittering costume jewellery, with fluttering eyelashes and gleaming eyes. A room full of sparkle. A room full of joy. You cannot help but love them, too.

Their appearance, teetering on the brink of high art and low art (due primarily to the inexpensive rhinestones), belies their complexity, and the work of sticking these jewels on is meticulous. Add to that the myriad references to art history, with Thomas deliberately re-viewing and re-presenting famous reclining Venuses – her best-known work is probably A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007), which riffs on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) – and other nude female imagery. With regards to the gems, she says: “I wanted to figure out something that really resonated in the same way, as my own way of thinking about pointillism, and breaching that hierarchy and intersection between high and low art. Here I was, this girl from Camden, New Jersey, at Yale University. It was a deliberate exploration.”

Mickalene Thomas, A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel, 108 x 144 in (274.3 x 365.8 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

She goes on to explain that the stones were cheaper than paint, and, at that time, she was an up-and-coming artist with limited (financial) resources. “Because of my limitations, I figured out other ways to continue making my work. And the rhinestones just felt like they had this light and colour that I could push and play with in the same way as paint. Painting has so much to do with light, and they exuded the type of light that I was trying to convey at that time. They felt so precious to use. At that moment, it was just about the material. But the more I used the material, it evolved conceptually: thinking about beauty, about artefacts, about how we pass, pose and put things on ourselves to exude and be accepted. For me, the rhinestone is not necessarily separate from paint when I think of using them on my surface. I use them simultaneously, and they have the same hierarchy for me on the surface as the paint does. They are just as important as the thick paint. They are gestural marks on the surface.”²

The exhibition, which has already shown at the Broad in Los Angeles and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and which is set to move to Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in June, presents two decades of Thomas’s practice. As the curator, Rachel Thomas, explains: “[It] explores how Thomas’s art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while subverting common notions of beauty, sexuality, fame and more.” The work is political, insofar as “the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman”,³ and it transcends conventions, foregrounding women, especially women of colour and queer identity. While very much rooted in the contemporary, in terms of the visual and the linguistic, there are also moments where older motifs and universal iconography are employed, making a serious point about prejudice and racism, but with a lighter touch. For example, the banjo in Nus Exotique #6 (2023), a work derived from an image Thomas is actively reclaiming from the white men it was made for, nevertheless, knowingly tongue-in-cheek, adds exoticism to the eroticism.

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.

Thomas is a queer woman, and her work, too, is undeniably and celebratorily queer. But queer here goes beyond the queerness of sexuality. As the author Darnell L Moore writes in his essay for the exhibition catalogue: “[B]y queer I mean the erosion of boundaries drawn around gender and sexuality, power and subjugation … I mean queer” – and here he cites the author, theorist, educator and social critic bell hooks – “… ‘as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.’”⁴ The exhibition title, too, was taken from hooks’s internationally acclaimed book of the same name, subtitled New Visions, published in 2000, and it is framed by a quote, writ large as a wall vinyl, where one enters the gallery: “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” In the context of this exhibition, the title All About Love prompts an exploration of complex and empowering emotions and relationships, beginning with oneself. As Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery, said at the press view: “[Thomas’s works don’t show us the sitter so much as the relationship between the artist and the sitter: essentially, they are portraits of love. That sense of presence, that deep recognition: in a way, that’s what love is all about.” Thomas expands: “Desire, for me, is ‘all about love’: self-love, family-love, in-love, being loved and understanding that love is multi-dimensional.”⁵ Her relationship with her mother, the fashion model Sandra “Mama Bush” Bush, who died in 2012, was pivotal. “It all began as a young child, when I recognised beauty and desire by the way the world responded to my mother’s beauty. My understanding of the complexity of desire started with how I perceived myself in relation to my mother … My [mum], whom I featured extensively in my earlier work, showed me how to unapologetically love my body.”⁶ A good example of this learning might be Afro Goddess Looking Forward (2015), a self-portrait in which Thomas appears relaxed and confident, her eyes collaged in as a strip from a photo, combined with layers of paint and rhinestone hair and lips. One could ask whether the “eye mask” is a mask over her eyes, protecting her from the public’s voyeuristic gaze, or the revelation of her true self beneath the otherwise decorated image, by tearing away the mask. The poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine draws from Thomas’s own recognition of her mother’s teachings, stating: “Thomas’s work claims for Black women the simplest and most important thing a person could have – self-regard.”⁷

Mickalene Thomas, Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel, 82 x 72 in (208.3 x 182.9 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Thomas’s compositions invariably begin with a photograph. Photography is her way of thinking. “For me, photography is probably the most profound and powerful tool in our contemporary society,” she says.⁸ Explaining her process at the press view, she continues: “If I find an archival photograph, I will scan it into Photoshop, change what I want to change, and print it out. I make my own reading through my own process. I push it far away from its original source.” Sometimes she leaves the photographic source more blatantly apparent, as is the case with Portrait of Marie (2015), where the whole right-hand side of the model is a grainy black-and-white enlargement. This work also, however, has the most fantastic use of impasto on the left-hand side of Marie’s face, and a blue-tinted print for her right eye, which make me think of someone painting their face, or applying thick makeup, ahead of going on stage or out into the ring to perform. Yet the work is intimate, all about love, and this collision jars. This piece is also a good example of Thomas’s use of different (and beautifully) clashing patterns – a common thread through all her works. Here, I remember taking the bus down Old Kent Road in south-east London on a Sunday and seeing all the gaily dressed women, with bold dresses and vibrant skirts and turbans, but Thomas’s models are naked, and so the patterns are for everything but their absent clothing. Art-historically, the patterns speak to those of Henri Matisse – who also worked extensively with collage and the female nude – and the intimists, such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, whose densely patterned interiors were less a celebration of love per se, but of the women – wives, sisters, mothers, lovers – in their own lives.

Taking this use of pattern to the extreme, Thomas also creates installations, which explore how our identities are shaped by the spaces we inhabit and might also be seen as a development of the set design she undertakes for her models in her bread-and-butter portrait photography practice. The first one we encounter, I was Born to Do Great Things (2014), presents two adjacent – yet polar opposite – living rooms. The first is full-on late-1970s and recalls her grandmother’s from during her childhood in New Jersey. It is pattern central. It comprises a sofa with cushions, two armchairs, a footstool; there is wallpaper and a lampshade, and a large self-portrait: Portrait of Mickalena (2010), in which Thomas performs her childhood alter ego, Quanikah. Even the tiles on the floor have different marquetry patterns. There is a hand mirror on a side table, which seems to invite the viewer to take a look at herself, and bronze Crocs, placed on the doormat, pointing the correct way for the viewer to simply step into them and become part of the scene. There is even a cup of tea ready and waiting on the coffee table. The second room is minimalist by comparison and perhaps more “white” than the riot of “ethnic” in the first. The sofa and carpet are silvery, the lampshades an art-deco mother of pearl. As with the banjo mentioned above, a pearl bracelet on the table is a nod to the art-historical trope of using pearls to symbolise “Otherness”. Lounge music is playing, and there is a Diana Ross and Lionel Richie LP propped against the table leg. The whole back wall is one big mirror, thus making the viewer a part of the scene, whether or not she wants to be. Here, the shoes are placed on a mat in front of the sofa, lying on top of one another, as if they have just been kicked off by someone settling down for an evening of TV and schmoozing. This room dates to Thomas’s teenage years in the 1980s. It is funny, then, given the detail with which she places these rooms temporally, that she describes her “hope to depict a complexity of identity, femininity, Blackness and beauty that is outside of temporal or spatial specificity”.⁹ Perhaps this can be best explained by her belief that making art is an extension of who she is, and that she can make an expression of herself and her surroundings from any time at any time. She further adds: “I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.”¹⁰ That is, these rooms, although specific to Thomas, are also specific to all Black women who lived through the same era. Another beautiful detail adding to the overall effect of these rooms is the hanging of wooden-beaded curtains in the doorways to and from the gallery, which clickety-clack along to the music, creating a percussion one might dreamily imagine to be the sparkling sound of myriad rhinestones.

Mickalene Thomas, Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2023. Rhinestones, acrylic and glitter on canvas mounted on wood panel, 90 x 110 in (228.6 x 279.4 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Bringing her into the scene, Thomas’s use of mirrors at once implicates the viewer in the objectification of her muses, while simultaneously giving her a subjective agency and, perhaps, vulnerability. As Rachel Thomas notes: “The mirror is a powerful tool because it forces you to deal with yourself on a deeper level. Conceptually, paintings are like mirrors. They’re an expression from the artist: ‘This is how I view the world – I’m presenting it to you.’”¹¹ Next to the living rooms hangs a very large-scale rendering of Gustave Courbet’s Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) (1866), in which a glossy, jet black figure with red rhinestone hair lies wrapped around a yellower figure, wearing a blue rhinestone head scarf. Once more, we have the implication of Otherness – or perhaps even Other Otherness. What, in the original painting, is Othered owing to the models’ apparent lesbianism is here Othered from the celebration of queer Black women, found in all of Thomas’s work, to the tangling of a Black woman with a lighter-skinned Muslim woman. Although not using mirrored surfaces, the painting is fragmented into piercing shards – negatively construed, this could suggest broken dreams; more positively construed, perhaps the prevention of further voyeurism and the securing of the women’s private world – which collage together numerous landscapes: trees, a sunset, water, meadows. Whereas Courbet’s original is set in a bedroom, Thomas has vacated her usual patterned interior to find an equally patterned exterior world in which she can portray the love between the two women as natural and without shame.

Alongside photography, collage is key to Thomas’s practice; it is, as Rachel Thomas says in her introduction, “the principal means by which she explores a multifaceted, multidimensional understanding of identity”. Collage permits the parallel process of reinvention and critique.¹² Shrine (2024) held me captive for ages, sharing the same aesthetic as my own home, namely: if you like something, stick it all together, and it will clash but somehow work. Here we have a snapshot of, I assume, Thomas’s (teenage?) bedroom, with inspirational quotes – for example, “You Got This” (much as I personally hate this one!), “Never be shaken, no matter what happens or what others say. Never be flustered. Never lose confidence …” and (one I appreciate much more) “I’m not opinionated – I’m just always right!”; notes from lovers; pictures of Black idols (including Oprah Winfrey, Whitney Houston, Nelson Mandela, Tina Turner and Eartha Kitt); piles of books; miniature Buddha statuettes; candles; plants; flowers; and one section where a strip of black net curtain hangs in front of the pegboard, so that the viewer is looking through a Black veil – a literal rendering of the metaphorical experience of looking at Thomas’s work at all. On the ground, not immediately noticeable, but, once noticed, never unseen, is a silver sculpture of two women having ecstatic sex, which is an appetiser for the Wrestlers series still to come upstairs.

Mickalene Thomas, Naughty Girls (Need Love Too), 2009. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel, 96 x 120 in (243.8 x 304.8 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Also upstairs are some joyful collages of faces – small-scale and large-scale – the hash-tagged number on each revealing the manifold transformations and existences of each idea. Untitled #10 (2014), my favourite, has rhinestone-studded eyelashes to represent the closed right eye and a flower for the left. It stands in dialogue with cubist collage, especially Picasso’s Tête de Femme linocut series from the 1960s. In this gallery, where the central floorspace is a mirrored pond full of plants, it exists in two incarnations: a small “sketch” and a large canvas. Is this glassy water where the alchemy and growth occurs?

A clever curation, extending beyond Thomas’s exhibition, is the parallel programming of Linder: Danger Came SmilingLinder: Danger Came Smiling , showcasing 50 years’ of the white British female artist’s photomontages and collages. Asked, at the press view, about showing alongside Linder, Thomas said: “I find it incredibly exciting that these two different women from two different ethnicities and generations, from two different worlds, are landing on the same platform … thinking about seduction and desire, whether it’s the white body or the Black body or both.” Rachel Thomas, however, was also quick to point out that we wouldn’t be asking any such questions about the programming of two male artists side-by-side. “We’re in the 21st century, where we are looking at two pioneering, trailblazing, female artists, and we should celebrate this and look at the notion of photomontage and collage, but ultimately the notion of seduction and desire and agency, political agency, that has a sense of beauty.”

Mickalene Thomas, A Moment’s Pleasure #2, 2008. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel, 72 x 84 in (183 x 213.4 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Upstairs we encounter the extreme sexuality and explicit, exotic eroticism of Thomas’s Wrestlers series, shown in a “private” room with red beanbags. The two women in each picture are wearing tiger- and zebra-print leotards, enhancing the animalistic nature of their rumble and tumble, as boundaries are blurred between pleasure and pain, struggle and affection, dominance and submission. In many, teeth are bared and flailing limbs hold each other down, like predator and prey in a fight to the end. All the figures are, however, self-portraits, and thus the conflict might be understood as that between our internal parts. Outside this space, around the mirrored pond, works are, contrarily, censored, with large-scale pixelation used to cover parts of the model’s body as if there were a glitch in the image. This is a play on the partial female nudity of the 1970s’ Jet magazine pinup calendars, known for their inventive obfuscation that retained the model’s partial modesty. In June 1976 (2022), the band of blurred pixels across the middle of the image, partially obscuring a nipple and fully covering the model’s genital area, becomes like another form of pattern.

Other sections upstairs include some more straightforward photographic pieces – albeit still exuberant in and of themselves, as, for example, Untitled #5 (Orlando Series) (2019, printed 2024); a black-and-white quadtych celebrating hair (Hair Portrait #15, 2013); La Maison de Monet (2022), a grand-scale collage, resulting from a summer residency in Giverny in 2011; and two installations with film: Me as Muse (2016) and Angelitos Negros (2016). Each of the last two provides welcoming seats, covered in ebullient fabrics – once more welcoming the viewer into the artwork. Me as Muse tackles art history head on, splicing pictures of Thomas in the nude with images of well-known reclining Venuses and nudes. Zooming in and out, the body is scanned, fingers rubbing, blurring, adding a heightened sensuality. The soundtrack, however, could scarcely be more ironic: the voice of Eartha Kitt talks to the BBC about how she wasn’t wanted as “a yellow child”, and how people don’t want to marry “a coloured person”. The visually desirable is held up, scrutinised and rejected before it has even blossomed. This piece speaks to institutional racism and the manifold personal hurt it can cause. The juxtapositions with historical works make us question the women behind the immortalised images: were they loved, were they taken care of, did they live contented lives? As Rugoff noted: “At the Hayward we like to showcase the work of artists who are profoundly adventurous, who challenge us to look at images from the past in unexpected ways.”

Mickalene Thomas, Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, 2012. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel, 108 x 240 in (274.3 x 609.6 cm). © Mickalene Thomas.

Angelitos Negros (2016) also features Kitt and is inspired by and named after her 1953 song, in which she implores artists to add Black angels to their religious paintings. The imagery combines the original footage of Kitt with some of Thomas performing as Kitt. In a way, this eight-channel work, with its own living room and patterned easy chairs, is a summary of the exhibition and Thomas’s practice as a whole: it combines collage with a celebration and making visible of Black female beauty.

The final room, which features three works from Thomas’s recent Resist series, is the most explicitly political. Say Their Names (Resist #6) (2021) is radically different from her other works, comprising a simple typed list of the names of Black men and women who have died at the hands of US law enforcement or while in custody. The more visual compositions on the end walls of the gallery carry more charge, layering archival protest materials and images, from as recently as the uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, with figures from, for example, Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Yet, while these deliberately political compositions are effective, for me, the most resounding political comments still come from Thomas’s “incidentally political” earlier works downstairs, which trump thanks to their shimmering glory, their exuberant intimacy and their ability to articulate a complex and empowering vision of womanhood,¹³ which defies anyone to walk past without stopping to take a closer look.

References
1. The artist cited in Mickalene Thomas: Redefining Desire, Love and Identity in Contemporary Art by Rachel Thomas, in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Publishing, 2024, page 21.
2. The artist speaking at the press view, Hayward Gallery, London, 10 February 2025. She also confessed that nowadays, as a successful and more affluent artist, she works not with rhinestones but Swarovski crystals.
3. The artist cited in An Ethic of Love: Mickalene Thomas and Collage by Ed Schad, exh cat, page 186.
4. To Be Black and a Woman is to Live Queerly by Darnell L Moore, exh cat, pages 148-49.
5. The artist cited in Thomas, exh cat, page 21.
6. ibid, pages 22 and 19.
7. That’s Your Mama by Claudia Rankine, exh cat, page 88.
8. The artist cited in Thomas, exh cat, page 22.
9. The artist cited in Schad, exh cat, page 179.
10. The artist cited in an exhibition wall text.
11. Thomas, exh cat, page 42.
12. ibid, page 20.
13. ibid, page 18.