When I entered the first-floor galleries of the Broad in Los Angeles in June, I found that I’d been transported to a residential street in Camden, New Jersey, where the open door of a yellow clapboard townhouse beckoned. Crossing the threshold, I arrived in a living room—a pair of living rooms, actually, presented side by side. The first was all 1970s: moody lighting illuminated a cozy wood-paneled room lush with house plants and furnishings upholstered in an eye-grabbing combination of bold florals, African wax fabrics, and animal prints. Guarding the sofa was a ceramic white tiger; observing the room from one wall was a trio of photographs of an alluring Black woman in an Afro and a crocheted top. The second living room took me to the 1980s: a mirrored room with blue shag rug where Sade’s groovy “Punch Drunk” emanated from the stereo console.
These tableaux were inspired by the New Jersey houses where the fifty-three-year-old artist Mickalene Thomas grew up. (The photos of the woman in a crocheted top? That’s her mother, Sandra Bush.) And they functioned as the point of entry to the artist’s first international museum exhibition, “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” which opened at the Broad in late May. The LA version of the show, organized by the curator Ed Schad, was the largest of the tour, which is currently at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and will travel next year to London and Toulouse. Thomas has resisted calling the show, which includes more than eighty works made over two decades, a survey or retrospective. As she told The New York Times in April, those words seem “so finite, so definite—closed and fixed.” Instead, “All About Love” opts for a vaguely chronological but largely thematic structure revolving around portraiture, historical painting, and Black civil rights.
The living rooms, which triggered gauzy memories of my shag-carpeted Gen X youth, could be read as facile exercises in nostalgia. But these meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for the rest of the exhibition, which features the work for which Thomas is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends—frequently embellished with dazzling arrangements of rhinestones (a signature material).
The mood-setting continued throughout the exhibition. Lights were dimmed. Walls were saturated in color or sheathed in wallpaper. About midway through the show, a gallery with a salon-style hang of Thomas’s photographs featured an actual salon that viewers were invited to inhabit. Club chairs and ottomans were wrapped in bright prints evocative of that 1970s living room; books by Black writers occupied end tables. Screening on a series of monitors along one wall was a video piece featuring Eartha Kitt and several other women (including the artist herself) crooning “Angelitos Negros,” a song inspired by a 1940s poem by the Venezuelan writer Andrés Eloy Blanco, in which an unnamed narrator implores an artist to paint Black angels. When I visited the museum, I found a cluster of young women engaged in animated conversation in the space. The music, the dimmed lighting, the comfortable seating—it was delightful, and not the sort of gallery where anyone would tell you to hush. Thomas hadn’t simply hung her paintings at the Broad; she had built a home for them and invited us in.
In her essay collection The Black Interior (2004), the poet and critic Elizabeth Alexander analyzes the interiors that Black people create for themselves. The domestic space, she writes, is “a pragmatic space in which the black body is not only visible, but also safe.” The living room, specifically, is where the self is idealized and presented. “It is therefore a theatrical space,” she adds. “The living room is where we see black imagination made visual, a private space that inevitably reverberates against the garish public images usually out of our control.”
In “All About Love,” Thomas delivers some exalted living room theatricality—but more significantly, she takes control. For more than two decades the artist has challenged the absence of Black people in Western art as well as stereotypical depictions of them, with a focus on queer Black women and femmes. Following the living room tableaux at the Broad was a gallery of larger-than-life portraits that date back to the early days of Thomas’s career. Look at What You’ve Become, a horizontal painting from 2005, shows a Black woman in a pink shirt reclining on a couch covered in a red-and-blue lattice motif. Embellishing the woman’s form and her surroundings are hundreds of rhinestones that have been painstakingly glued to the painting’s surface. Her shirt is highlighted in white rhinestones, her Afro is rendered in black, and her lips—along with a nipple that slips provocatively out of her shirt—are ornamented in a rich shade of brown. She sparkles, as does the entire composition.
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A nearly seven-foot-tall vertical portrait titled Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher (2009) shows the artist’s mother dressed up for a night on the town. Behind her is a collage of forms that includes a floral print wallpaper rendered in turquoise paint and golden rhinestones. Across the room, Din, une très belle négresse #2 (2012), a painting that is eight-and-a-half feet tall, captures one of Thomas’s longtime models in a floral shirt before another 1970s-style floral wallpaper. Her eyeshadow and lips are highlighted in purple and blue rhinestones. Like all the women in the room, she looks confident and relaxed. She glances at the viewer with a knowing side-eye.
Thomas’s art goes beyond skin-deep empowerment. Her work draws from and critiques the formal traditions of Western art. She is inspired by African patterns and African photography of the mid-twentieth century, but she makes these her own. She generally starts with pictures—some of which are presented as photographs, others of which go on to inspire paintings. Thomas will often photograph her models in elaborate sets that evoke exaggerated visions of the crafty living room of her 1970s youth. A vintage couch might be draped in animal prints. The women in her images are often decked out in radiant patterns, their hair big and often natural—an aesthetic that harkens to the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s, with its celebration of African prints and unprocessed hair. In the catalog for the exhibition, Thomas describes these sets as a way of creating an intimate space for her “muses,” a place “to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mothers’ or grandmothers’ living rooms.”
Thomas’s pattern-against-pattern aesthetic also channels the work of Malian photographers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who were known for stylized portraiture that often featured their subjects against geometric textile backdrops. Whereas Sidibé and Keïta photographed their subjects in black and white, however, Thomas opts for a full blast of color. In her images you’ll see turquoise in the shades of Caribbean waters and purples that recall the tones of grape jelly. In the Broad’s salon-style gallery hung a portrait of the artist Carrie Mae Weems, whose 1990 photographic project the Kitchen Table Series was an important influence on Thomas, especially owing to its intimate depictions of Black domestic life. In Thomas’s photograph, “Madame Carrie” wears a clover-green gown and pink satin shoes and sits on a Savonarola chair over a floral rug rendered in tropical shades of orange and blue—and she shows a flirty amount of leg.
With Thomas, more is more—and that is the point. In a poignant essay in the catalog, the scholars Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Kristian Contreras contemplate how Black women’s looks and physicality have been historically constricted. “Too often, we are tasked with the assumption that to gain a seat at the figurative table, we must prove that we belong,” they write. “The word ‘too’ is overused, even: we are too loud, too confident, too assertive or simply too much, and expected to shrink.” Thomas’s depictions allow Black women to be.
They likewise counter the pernicious imagery of the past. In their 2002 study The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, the scholar Deborah Willis and the photographer Carla Williams write:
Until the late nineteenth century, the black female was seldom the primary subject of a work of Western art. Exotic but rarely exalted, the black female image frequently functioned as an iconographic device to illustrate some subject believed to be worthier of depiction, often a white female. When she appeared at all, she was a servant in the seraglio, a savage in the landscape…but always merely an adjunct.
As they note, Black people have also been used as specimens—often to illustrate bogus and racist scientific concepts. Particularly infamous are the Zealy daguerreotypes held by Harvard’s Peabody Museum, images of enslaved people created by a zoologist in a failed attempt to prove that different races had different biological origins. (Weems, incidentally, created a fiery artistic response to these daguerreotypes in the 1990s, in a series titled From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried—images that have clearly left an imprint on Thomas.)
Thomas’s most direct critique of this visual past is a 2016 video installation titled Me as Muse. It consists of a stack of twelve video monitors that flash between the artist’s reclining nude body and historic depictions of Black women. The audio features a clip of Eartha Kitt, taken from a talk show interview, discussing the abuses of her youth. It’s a pointed, moving work.
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Just as pointed are the ways Thomas subverts art historical imagery to celebrate Black women. A pair of large sepia Polaroids from 2011 that were hanging in the Broad’s salon gallery mimic the conventions of nineteenth-century scientific portraiture, depicting the models Melody and Marie nude and facing the camera. Unlike the terrorized subjects of the Zealy daguerreotypes, however, the women in these images look pensive and unperturbed, their dark skin luminous. Thomas’s paintings are even more eye-catching, featuring complex arrangements of figure and form. A canvas titled A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) features the artist’s then girlfriend, Maya, a slender Black woman with an Afro, reclining on a bed of floral fabrics, bedazzled with rhinestones, in the style of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814). Across the room a trio of Black women assume the confident poses of the picnickers in Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).
The tribute to Manet, completed in 2022, is wonderfully intricate. To make it, Thomas adhered a large-scale black-and-white photograph of the three women to a wooden panel. Two of the figures she embellished with paint; the third remains black-and-white, creating a collage effect. Rhinestones have been applied to the women to create Picasso-esque outlines of their forms, a nod to the Spanish painter’s various tributes to Manet. Moreover, the figures are framed by a series of jagged blocks of blue paint that resemble a fractured mirror, leaving the viewer to unravel whether the painting is a painting of a painting or a painting of a reflection (alluding to the question of what it means to see yourself in art). Trying to tease out the layers of this work is like looking at Claude Monet’s late paintings of water lilies, which depict not just a pond but the reflection of clouds on the surface of the pond, along with the bits of vegetation that quiver beneath the surface.
The gallery featuring Thomas’s art historical works marks a striking shift in her art. In the 2010s she began to fragment her compositions, breaking up her figures through collage and replacing straightforward depictions of rooms with room-like environments that consist of wild intersections of patterned planes. Most remarkable among these is Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge (2023), showing Din, one of the artist’s regular muses, in a sparkling blond wig and flowing red skirt seated amid a collage of geometric patterns and textiles. It’s as if the room were arranging itself around her. In one hand Din holds a mirror; it is casually aimed at her crotch.
“All About Love” is a deeply sensuous show. Nipples slip into view, and women sit with their legs casually splayed open (not pornographically but simply as women sit when they don’t have to worry about men). One of the final galleries at the Broad paid tribute to the nudes featured in old Jet magazine calendars and the French publication Nus Exotiques. Appropriating photographs of Black women intended for the male gaze, Thomas dresses them up in rhinestones and bits of floral tapestry, obscuring the genitalia of one figure with an image of a plant—a bush, one could say. At the heart of the room, the artist laid out a grid of mirrored tiles and topped it with a dense arrangement of plastic plants. (More bush!) As Thomas told the curator Rachel Thomas in an interview in the catalog, “My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.”
The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1999 book of the same name by bell hooks, in which the feminist theorist explored the myriad meanings of love. You can feel the love in Thomas’s depictions of Black women and their bodies. Particularly noteworthy are the images of her mother, Sandra Bush. A former model, Bush was a striking woman with milk chocolate skin, a sharp nose, and a catalog of flirtatious glances. Until her death in 2012, she was one of the artist’s frequent subjects. And, in the salon-style gallery, a photograph titled Madame Mama Bush (2006) shows her basking on a sofa in a gauzy red shirt, her breasts exposed and her head thrown back in a gesture of languid pleasure. As a culture we desexualize mothers, but Thomas has chosen to see her own in the manner she wanted to be seen—as someone who desires and is desired.
Some sections of the exhibition, however, didn’t quite cohere. At the Broad, a room toward the end gathered four works from the artist’s “Resist” series, begun in 2017, which consists of collaged paintings that examine Black civil rights and racial violence. The Charnel House (Resist #5) (2021), for example, collages images connected to Black organizing, including Black Lives Matter and the Black Panthers, with elements of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). The themes are important. But on the whole, these works don’t have the compositional strength or uncanny depths of her portraiture.
The final room, likewise, featured a simplistic pink neon sculpture of a female figure and a pair of Thomas’s large-scale “Tête de Femme” collages, in which she generates masklike faces out of paper, paint, and glitter. These are charming at a small scale. Across from the living room tableaux was an eleven-inch-tall Tête displayed among other small-scale collages and photography that, altogether, gave insight into the artist’s process of mixing and remixing. But blown up to a height of eight feet, the Têtes lose their power. In an exhibition that devotes so much careful attention to the Black female form, I would have preferred to see Thomas’s “Hair Portraits,” black-and-white paintings of heads rendered with rhinestones that recreate the patterns of the braids, knots, and twists worn by Black women. They are featured in the catalog but were curiously omitted from the Broad’s presentation (though one of them is scheduled to appear in the European versions of the show).
Perhaps when Thomas comes to terms with the idea of a retrospective, her various bodies of work can receive more considered attention. The omissions, however, do not diminish the show’s strengths. Her individual portraits are often knockouts; seen together, they paint a stirring picture of love within a community. In her book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks discussed the importance of experiencing love not just romantically, or within a nuclear family, but within an extended network of people. “The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go,” she wrote. “With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go a place where we return to love.” At the Broad, Thomas created a place of love. And that is an achievement.
