Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971) is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Early life and education
Mickalene Thomas was born on January 28, 1971, in Camden, New Jersey. She was raised in Hillside and East Orange. She was raised by her mother Sandra "Mama Bush" Bush, who, at 6'1" tall, modeled in the 1970s. She exposed Mickalene and her brother to art by enrolling them in after-school programs at the Newark Museum, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York. Thomas' mother raised her and her brother Buddhists. As a teenager, Mickalene and her mother had a very intimate and strenuous relationship due to her parents' addiction to drugs and Thomas dealing with her sexuality, which she documented in the short film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother.
Thomas lived and attended school in Portland, Oregon, from the mid-1980s to the early '90s, studying pre-law and Theater Arts. Thomas received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2002. Thomas participated in a residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York from 2000 to 2003. She also participated in a residency in Giverny, France at the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Artwork, style, and influences
During her early career, she found herself immersed in the growing culture of DIY artists and musicians, leading her to start her own body of work. Mickalene noted that when she became an artist, fashion was always "in the back of my mind" as a source of inspiration. She was influenced by Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson, and Romare Bearden Most influential to her was the work of Carrie Mae Weems, especially her Kitchen Table and Ain't Jokin series, which were part of a retrospective held at the Portland Art Museum in 1994. Thomas describes the encounter in this way: "It was the first time I saw work by an African-American female artist that reflected myself and called upon a familiarity of family dynamics and sex and gender." Weems' work not only played a role in Mickalene Thomas' decision to switch studies and apply to Pratt Institute in New York but to use her experience and turn it into art. Thomas has also stated that Faith Ringgold provided an strong influencing in establishing Thomas' path.
Her depictions of African-American women explore notions of celebrity and identity while engaging with the representation of black femininity and black power. Inhabiting the '70s-style genre of Blaxploitation, the subjects in Thomas's paintings and collages radiate sexuality, which has been interpreted by some as satire of misogynistic and racist tropes in media, including films and music associated with the Blaxploitation genre. Women in provocative poses dominate the picture plane and are surrounded by decorative patterns inspired by her childhood as in Left Behind 2 Again from 2012, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Her subjects are often well-known women like Eartha Kitt, Whitney Houston, Oprah Winfrey, and Condoleezza Rice. Her portrait of Michelle Obama was the first individual portrait done of the First Lady and was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery's Americans Now show.
In her 2017 solo exhibition "Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities" at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), Thomas created multi-media installations that centered black women in the narrative-arcs of their own stories. According to art critic Rikki Byrd: "Positioning black women — artists, actresses, characters, and her own family — as mentors and muses, and as heroic figures in a lineage of their own, Thomas overrides oppressive narratives."