Mickalene Thomas Doesn’t Need the Whitney Biennial
The paintings of Mickalene Thomas are big, bold, gaudy, and beautiful, embedded with rhinestones, daubed with phosphorescent color, and composed like crazy quilts. Born in Camden, New Jersey, and based in Brooklyn, this 54-year-old artist grabs our attention with glorious portraits of Black women that incorporate a dizzying mix of cultural-historical references, from Cubism and Matisse to Pam Grier and Carrie Mae Weems. Most famously, the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 commissioned a painting from Thomas tilted Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, a play on the Manet work that shocked 19th-century audiences with its depiction of a nude female lounging with two fully dressed gentlemen in a forest. Thomas’s rendition, in which the figures are replaced with Black models in bioluminescent makeup, is a masterpiece of collage and commentary.
“It’s about Black women claiming a space,” she told me in a conversation last February at the New York Academy of Art, which is reproduced here, edited and condensed for clarity, ahead of the closing of Thomas’s retrospective at the Barnes in Philadelphia.
Your work hits with an incredible retinal punch. It’s brazen, confident, aggressive, power-infused, experimental, and loaded with high-keyed color. What you do with women, Black women, and queer bodies makes you one of the greatest so-called later-day Cubists of art and identity. Why you haven’t ever been included in a Whitney Biennial? I complained about it online.
I think the curators that usually are selected aren’t thinking of my work or its breadth. When they think Mickalene Thomas, they’re thinking of portraiture. They’re not looking at all the different bodies of work that I work within. From photography to collage, to installation, performance, creating immersive spaces, video, and film. I think most curators are lazy. There’s not enough risk-taking. They’re staying confined, choosing artists that seem safe. My work isn’t easy. It’s fine. In truth, being in a Whitney Biennial is not something I aspire to. I took that off my list a long time ago. It doesn’t give me inspiration to get into my studio every day. It doesn’t allow me to generate ideas. I don’t need those type of accolades to validate what I do and why I make the art I make.
What draws me to your work is that it goes off like a visual, cerebral atomic bomb.
I put everything in it — the complications of perspective and foreground and background, pulling from various genres of art practices. I propose these questions formally and compositionally. Everyone can approach a painting from a personal, conceptual, or theoretical way, but in the end, it is about the formal aspects. And I’m interested in boxing with those. I’m interested in getting in the ring with those artists, whether they’re French Impressionists or artists from the Harlem Renaissance period or western sort of classic painting.
You never stay in your own lane.
That’s too easy. I like to feel uncomfortable. I like to feel that there’s a mystical aspect to the work that’s kind of out of my control. When I’m adhering to a particular model or system, no one needs to tell me to tie my hand behind my back. I allow the work to organically evolve. Of course, I have to sometimes say, You’ve done this too many times. You have to allow yourself to push up against your own work to create something new.
The art world likes to act like an undertaker and pronounce things are dead, like painting or the author. This strikes me as a way of saying to newer artists, “No need to apply. Problem solved.”
Painting will never die. Painting absorbs everything, every tool. When you think about technology — AI or Photoshop — these digital processes are alive in the ways artists are making their paintings. They’re all just new tools for seeing and thinking about space and what’s out in the world, how to pull from that and ascertain it, then bring it back into your own work. Most painting is about who we are. We want to see ourselves multiplied even more.
Can you talk about your killer 2010 painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires.
It was my first large-scale painting and was commissioned by MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach. At the time, I was not working in a large scale. It was a challenge. I went to the museum, photographed all the models there, the first time I photographed my models outside of my studio. I was very excited about that multi-layering of historical art figures from Manet and Matisse. It is irregularly shaped, 10 by 24 feet, in three separate parts because I couldn’t fit it into my studio at the time. I didn’t see the painting fully installed until it was installed at MoMA.
How was it made? What was the process? Which is generally the thing I am most curious about in all art.
My process is I create a photograph, then a collage, then a series of collages. I use collage as a way of understanding how to construct the work and the space. It works as a way of drawing for me, of figuring out and understanding a story and sorting out the image — what am I trying to convey here?
Who owns this painting?
It was unfortunate. MoMA was supposed to buy it. They reserved it for about four years. And then they decided not to buy it.
But why? I’m not putting you on the spot, but why? Because they’re scared?
Because you have people in positions who don’t value the work enough that it’s deserving of particular spaces. Often, it’s because you don’t have people who look like me in the room sitting at the table. When you don’t have us in the room or on the board or among the trustees, then those acquisitions are really hard to push through, even though you might have one person who is really cheerleading for the artist.
What about the suggestive poses?
It’s about Black women claiming a space. Making the Le Déjeuner gave me the validation and the courage to start making nude paintings on a larger scale. It’s about how the viewer is confronted with the sitter. Having this beautiful Black female body in the same historical pose as a classic icon like Grande Odalisque would send a message to the notions of beauty.
Was it well received in 2010?
No. People were apprehensive, like, “What is she making?” One incredible collector bought it and donated it to the Brooklyn Museum.
And you don’t paint Black bodies in pain and torture.
No. I’m not interested in trauma, not that trauma doesn’t deserve space and recognition. There’s so much trauma and chaos in the world already that I’m really interested in pulling out specific narratives about joy and excellence, and also about the state of leisure, because leisure is not necessarily what you consider when you think of Black bodies. We’re looked at as laborers. We’re looked at as workers. We’re looked at as the caretakers. We’re not looking at us in a state of rest. And so for me to personify these women in the same repose as these white women in these classical gestures is me claiming that space and dignifying my sisters in the same way, that we too are deserving of this state of leisure.
What do you make of all the screeds over DEI?
Now it’s like, “Okay, we had DEI. We had diversity, equity, inclusion. Now we’re going to remove these because we don’t need it anymore.” It’s a limited scope. The needle moves a little, then we default back to our bad behavior. We haven’t learned, we should not be in this situation even politically where Trump is even a part of our conversation. And so as a human being and society, we only have to blame ourselves, that we’re going backwards. When you think about Planned Parenthood, bodily autonomy, women’s bodies — why are we even having these conversations? We should be so further ahead in our society, and we’re not.
How do you think this might apply to your work?
There’s a major problem here. People are still not ready to see a Black body like this on this scale as they are seeing Eric Fischl’s bodies.
Nobody ever asks me, “What identity are you?” But you’re forced to answer, “Are you a Black artist? Are you a queer artist? Are you all of them?”
I’m just an artist. I am all of those things. There are often times where I have to represent one of them. And I’m proud of representing all of them and choosing to represent one of them when it’s necessary, because you have to. Sometimes you have to show up and say, “Yeah, I’m a Black artist, and there’s a reason why I’m making this work.” But that doesn’t define me, and I think oftentimes, we want to compartmentalize and put things in boxes because people are not comfortable with being uncomfortable. They want things be a certain way, and so in order to do that, for their own need, they put you in a category. It’s not because of you. It’s for themselves.
We’re only here for a brief time. Do everything. Don’t stay in your lane.
No. I think that would be my advice to a lot of artists — in your studios, experiment. Don’t get so fixed. Don’t get so focused on an idea. Challenge yourself, because the outside world’s not going to challenge you. You have to be your own critic. You have to get your own train off your tracks and make a different turn. You have to be willing to trip over your own shoelaces in your studio and allow some of those things to be failures and not understand and just scream at your own work and throw your brush at it. You have to do those things. You have to say, I’m going to throw this wad of toilet paper to the wall and see if it sticks.
That experimentation is crucial, because the work, I can tell you, all the work that I’m making is from all my experimentation in undergrad and graduate school. It’s come back into my work. I look at my journal and I say, “Oh, now I’m doing those things that I was experimenting with years ago.” If you don’t experiment, if you’re not willing to try these things, you’re not going to allow your work to organically grow where you’re not making the same thing. I have a lot of different bodies of work, and it’s not like I’m deciding, “Oh, I want to make a photograph. I want to do a video. I want to do film. I want to do sculpture.” Experimentation organically pushes me into those directions, because I’m not afraid to be like, Okay, let me try this in my own work.