If the rhinestone is artist Mickalene Thomas’s signature material, then exuberance is the signature spirit. Along with their sparkle, Thomas’s monumental artworks contain other hallmarks: stately women posed in bold patterned fabric with perfect posture and firm gazes. Her portraits are a celebration of Black queer womanhood, often recasting iconic 19th-century works with Black women at the center, in elegant states of leisure.
Born in 1971, Thomas attended Pratt, then received her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2002. The year after, she started a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, and soon her soaring and glittering portraits of Black women started to join museum collections. She’s collaborated with Solange for an album cover and painted the first individual portrait of the First Lady Michelle Obama, displayed at the National Portrait Gallery.
Thomas’s first major international tour started in May at The Broad in Los Angeles, is currently showing at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (a little more than ten miles from her birthplace in Camden, New Jersey), and will continue next February at the Hayward Gallery in London. Thomas named these shows, which contain two decades of her work, after bell hooks’s seminal text All About Love. Renée Mussai, curator for the Barnes exhibition, calls Thomas’s show “a visual love letter” and “beauty as action.”
The way Thomas describes it when we meet at the Barnes is that “love requires a different way of action.” She references her practice of adorning the shadows in her pieces with rhinestones as a visual echo of bell hooks’ arguments about loving the parts of our world that are usually hidden or overlooked.
Thomas’s sources, which she engages with as much as she revels in and ruptures, know no bounds. She draws from 1970s French erotica, 19th-century portraiture, the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, the fracturing of stained glass, and the Pointillism of French Impressionists. Through Thomas’s vision, everything seems recast in a prism of glittering, joyful light.
Where do you get your best recommendations for culture?
You just know what you’re attracted to. You’re just confident. I don’t necessarily follow someone’s lead, I just follow my own voice and direction. I’m inspired by something that I hear or I read, and I explore that. It takes me on a journey and it starts to lead me into the direction that I need. I like to think of myself as a cultural conduit, more than me receiving recommendations.
What is your pre-art-making ritual, before you start in the studio?
Cleaning. I tell my students to create a system and regimen. It’s cleaning and rearranging. Preparing yourself for creating art is just as important as making it.
Is there a book that you’d like to give to people?
I always give people Happiness Becomes You, by Tina Turner. There are a lot of similarities with her trajectory and my mother’s life: how they persevere, their strength and vulnerability as Black women in society, their own personal obstacles around relationships and involvement with men around abuse and love, but also their Buddhist practice. This book is a real gift to understanding who you are, spiritually and physically, in this world, and how to move through it with a sense of faith and hope. I buy it in cases and I keep it in my house. I usually have it at the bookstores and the shows that I exhibit at.
You paint friends, lovers, and models. How do you know that someone is right for a certain type of painting? Is that even the order you think of things?
There are particular women that possess a prowess, a sense of confidence, vulnerability, and strength that I seek, and so I’ll ask them if I can photograph them. It’s more about the energy of how they hold themselves, their body, and how they walk in the world. That is an attraction to want to capture in that moment.
Your work incorporates lots of ideas about desire. I’m curious what other work about desire, a movie, song, or something has spoken to you recently?
Always the film In the Mood for Love, by Wong Kar-wai. Pawel Pawlikowski’s film Ida. Any Gordon Parks photographs. James Van Der Zee’s photographs of Black women from the ’40s and ’50s are really beautiful. Toni Morrison. The Color Purple, and Alice Walker’s other books. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. The film Black Girl. Mahogany with Diana Ross. Models like Donyale Luna. Desire is complex, just like beauty is. So desire has connotations of everything that you can think of, from anger to enlightenment.
What’s your favorite game to play?
Charades. It tells a lot about how people work together and things that they come up with to speak, nonverbally. You see the creativity, the frustration, and how quick they are.
What’s your favorite piece of art that you have?
I have a Matisse etching that I love. I have a Barkley Hendricks photograph. A piece I would love to own is one of Elizabeth Catlett’s reclined nudes she made of Black women. And then I have some younger artists that I like a lot: I have a really beautiful Huma Bhabha, and an incredible John Edmonds photograph.
What’s the best piece of gossip you’ve ever heard?
I don’t know if I can answer that, because I don’t like gossip. I think gossip is kind of trite. It’s kind of senseless, because there’s truth and untruth to gossip. I don’t have time for it, because I usually think it’s rooted in people who have boring, boring lives. I don’t really care about celebrity gossip. In my circle of friends, we don’t tend to focus on outward things or that kind of banter, because it’s just not fruitful or helpful for what we’re trying to achieve.
What is the last meal that you cooked for dinner?
Probably chicken curry for my daughter. But the last meal I had for myself was a sort of raw diet of sliced heirloom tomatoes with sea-salt flakes, good olive oil, and pea shoots. Perfect.
Is there a movie or TV show that you will re-watch as a media-comfort object?
I love The Facts of Life, so I probably could watch that over and over again. And Sister, Sister.
What is something that you’ll never watch?
I used to love Forensic Files. Now, I no longer watch anything that is about abuse, atrocities, killing, murder, rape. I don’t watch scary movies. I don’t watch anything about killing people. I really believe that visual images are very powerful, and they can be really disruptive to our psyche. We can have the freedom to create and tell these stories, but I think we’ve gone overboard and sensationalized images about people who committed crimes, like stories about Jeffrey Dahmer. I don’t think we should be retelling their stories as a way of entertainment. We become immune, so we just become passive and we don’t care. We no longer become empathetic or sensitive to things that do happen to people because we constantly see them.
What is a book that you couldn’t put down?
There was one that I just got that I’m really enjoying right now: Law Roach’s book, How to Build a Fashion Icon. I love it.
What music do you listen to, specifically when you’re alone?
I listen to a lot of jazz. I listen to Nina Simone, Whitney’s my girl. I love Tracy Chapman. I love Snoh Aalegra; Erykah Badu’s radio is my go-to. Anything Billie Holiday. I just really like something soothing with lyrics that make me feel confident and good.
So I rephrased this question for you, because it has to do with celebrities—
I don’t mind celebrities. I’m just not obsessed with living my life through the gossip or the mirror of celebrities. I think we give them too much platform, where they become how we understand, how we move through the world. I think if we all individually live like we’re the beacon of light, then we’re not necessarily seeking a beacon of light.
Well, I would love you to answer this whichever way you would like, so either which celebrities or which artists would you like to invite to a dinner party that you’re having?
Some of the people that I’ve had in mind I’ve already had the opportunity to sit down and break bread with. If you asked me, like, five or four years ago, Oprah would have been on my list, Shonda Rhimes. They were people on my sort of mood board and I’ve had the opportunity to engage with them. So now I have to think about new people. Elizabeth Catlett is one. I’m really sad that I didn’t have a sit-down with Faith Ringgold when she was alive, when I had the opportunity to. Diahann Carroll, who made some incredible shifts, I would just want to talk about her journey through that. I would love to sit down with someone like Tracy Chapman. Sade. If Whitney Houston was still alive, it would be nice to sit down to talk to her. I think she would have been funny and unapologetic about a lot of things. Stevie Wonder. I guess Rihanna would be one. I think she’s really incredibly interesting. Grace Jones too.
And what’s the worst thing someone could do at a dinner party?
Sneeze really loudly and obnoxiously when someone else is talking. Also talk with their mouths full of food.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Not to really care about what people think about you, not to work from that space. You shouldn’t care about how people think about you, if that’s going to make you become a person where you’re doing things for them. I do care about how people feel. I do things because I want to do them, but I don’t care if people think that what I’m doing is different.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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