Mickalene Thomas Exhibition
Brooklyn Museum
This event has ended.
The Brooklyn Museum presents the first solo museum exhibition by Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Mickalene Thomas, best known for her vibrant paintings of African American women against backdrops of decor recalled from her childhood. On view September 28, 2012, through January 20, 2013, Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, which highlights the artist’s work from the past two years, will include some ninety-three pieces, among them a new body of work that explores landscapes and interiors. For the Brooklyn venue, Thomas has made new pieces, including a mural that will hang in the entrance gallery, as well as installations of furnished domestic interiors that evoke the settings in her paintings.
Thomas’s work grows from a long study of art history, drawing inspiration from the classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, as well as from contemporary popular culture, the imagery of which she uses to explore issues of identity and race, as well as beauty and the self. Her work, which synthesizes a wide range of artistic and cultural references into a unique vision of the world, presents a complex perspective on what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty.
Thomas’s oeuvre investigates the body in relationship to the landscape and interior spaces through a pictorial style that reimagines past masterworks and transforms them in a modern-day idiom for the present. Her signature portraits of vibrant black women in photographs, paintings, and collages explore artifice, masking, and costuming. Her interiors draw on a range of historical periods, from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century to the present.
Working with models drawn from her circle of friends and relatives, she outfits them with carefully selected wigs, costumes, and makeup, then poses them in looks inspired by black popular culture from the 1970s to the present. Although her referents are often the anonymous models depicted in works by such artists as Manet and Matisse, Thomas frequently identifies her own subjects in her titles.
Among the works included in the exhibition will be Mama Bush III, a portrait of the artist’s mother influenced by Ingres’s Le Grand Odalisque; Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, a rhinestone-studded, acrylic-and-enamel painting inspired by Manet’s famous work, in which Thomas substitutes three black women evoking 1970s blaxploitation films for the Paris demimonde trio pictured in the Manet version; a collage, Marie: Femme Noir nue Couchee, that synthesizes a long pictorial history of subordination and obliteration; and her contemporary riff on Courbet’s The Origin of the World.
Media
Schedule
from September 28, 2012 to January 20, 2013