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Mickalene Thomas: A Little Taste Outside of Love,
2007, acrylic, enamel and rhinestones on panel,
108 by 144 inches. Brooklyn Museum. Images this
article courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York,
and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
CrYStal
ViSionS
With rhinestone-encrusted black
women, tricked-out settings
and art historical reworkings,
Mickalene Thomas has created a
signature, if controversial, style.
BY Sarah Valdez
With an abundance of foxy, dark-skinned women, modernist
interiors, lush landscapes and patterned textiles rendered
mainly in paint and rhinestones, Mickalene thomas’s first solo
museum exhibition, the traveling “origin of the universe,” made an
alluring debut at the Santa Monica Museum of art this summer.
former deputy director Lisa Melandri organized its presentation
there, where it included only new work: 15 paintings, a photograph
and an installation. the exhibition is now at the brooklyn
Museum in appreciably expanded form, as a midcareer survey,
curated by eugenie tsai, comprising some 100 paintings, collages,
photographs, videos and installations from the past decade.
the striking quality of thomas’s paintings has to do not least with
the sparkly, light-refracting nature of their rhinestone-covered surfaces.
the artist—who was born in 1971 in camden, n.J., and is now
based in new york—applies the stones pointillistically in dynamic,
unexpected color schemes, amid painted and collaged elements
of various textures. Much of the work is large-scale and displays a
tension between the ornamental and the monumental. her bestknown
pieces depict sexualized, self-possessed african-american
women posing vampishly in 1970s-style environments and clothes.
the notion of consumer desire is hardly lost on thomas, whose
compositions often have the feel of magazine layouts, replete
with attractive models and staged interiors. in fact, her early work
appropriated imagery from actual magazines: the pornographic
Black Tail and the comparatively buttoned-down Ebony, both oriented
toward african-americans. these days, however, thomas
bases her compositions on her own photographs, some of which
she also exhibits as straight c-prints. though stylish, the prints
lack both the luster and complexity of the mixed-medium pieces.
Currently On View
“Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the
Universe” at the Brooklyn Museum, N.Y.,
through Jan. 20, 2013.
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Qusuquzah, Une Très Belle
Négresse #3, 2012, rhinestones,
acrylic, oil and enamel on panel,
96 by 80 inches.
EVOkING BOTh ’70S dEcOr ANd cUBISM, ThOMAS USES wOOd PANELING AS A MOTIf IN
hEr wOrk, ThE GrAIN SErVING IN OPTIcALLY PLEASING cONTrAST TO ThE SPArkLE.
in Qusuquzah Standing Sideways (2012), the lone photograph
in the Santa Monica presentation and one of 13 included in
brooklyn, thomas’s subject appears in a funky get-up consisting
of an off-the-shoulder, short-sleeved paisley jumpsuit; wide,
red-velvet belt; thick necklace; and gold, sequined beret, perhaps
a flashy take on the iconic black Panther headgear. She
meets the viewer’s gaze directly, hand on hip and foot planted
on a piece of furniture cut off by the frame. behind her is a wall
of wood paneling, a material that thomas—evoking not just ’70s
decor but also cubism—uses as a motif in her paintings as well,
the grain serving in optically pleasing contrast to the sparkle.
in “origin,” Qusuquzah also appears in rhinestone paintings
around 8 feet high and 7 feet wide, as does another model,
din. (Santa Monica featured three portraits of Qusuquzah
and two of din; brooklyn has these plus an additional portrait
of Qusuquzah.) each work is titled with the subject’s name,
followed by Une Très Belle Négresse (a very beautiful black
woman), a reference to Manet, who in 1862 painted a woman
he described in his journal as “Laure, une très belle négresse.”
Set against floral backgrounds in beiges and pastels, the
women pose assertively and invite admiration; the large scale
implies their importance. each subject is styled in the same
clothes and makeup in her multiple paintings. Qusuquzah’s
turquoise Sunday-best hat echoes her eye makeup and features
a fishnet veil—an impressive latticework composed of
rhinestones. din sports a sizable afro, purple eye shadow, blue
lipstick and a big silver necklace.
Qusuquzah’s and din’s confident bearings and unabashed
adornment seem at odds, to say the least, with the impassive
appearance of the anonymous subject in the courbet painting
after which the exhibition is titled. courbet’s famous oilon-canvas
beaver shot, L’Origine du monde (1866), depicts
a vulva, splayed legs, a torso and a breast, leaving out identifying
characteristics that might convey a personality, such
as a face, or body parts capable of action, like arms or feet:
pussy as mysterious, powerful void, front and center. the
“origin” exhibition contains new bejeweled takes on courbet’s
painting—one, as the viewer learns from the catalogue, with
thomas herself as the model; another with her partner, artist
carmen McLeod. Like duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946-66)—
which trumps courbet’s Origine with a scene of a splayed,
naked woman even paler and more lifeless-looking than her
predecessor, and which, installed permanently at the Philadelphia
Museum of art, is viewed through a pair of peepholes—thomas’s
renderings raise the unsettling, and timeworn,
question of whether or not courbet’s supine nude might
be dead and/or have been raped. encrusting the figure in
rhinestones hardly prevents such a reading, and in fact might
make the body appear only more inanimate. and depicting a
possibly violated or deceased female in such festive decorative
trimmings offers at best a confusing message.
thomas referenced duchamp’s Étant donnés directly in the
installation “take all the time you need” (2012), featured in Santa
Monica. (it doesn’t appear in the brooklyn presentation, which
instead includes four installations created specially for the show:
domestic interiors similar to the backdrops used for thomas’s
paintings and photographs.) Like duchamp’s tableau, the instal-
Qusuquzah Standing Sideways, 2012,
c-print, 60 by 48 inches.
lation involved viewing by peephole. first, you encountered a
tangerine-orange door with gold trim set into a gallery wall. the
eponymous funk tune by Roy ayers could be heard playing,
seemingly from behind the door. Looking through the peephole,
you saw a furnished room with nobody in sight, and it was
unclear whether the space was in fact a space or merely a twodimensional
illusion. (during the exhibition opening, however, a
live model lounged about inside, precluding this appealing ambiguity.)
the room was decorated in thomas’s retro esthetic, with
a wood-paneled wall hung with a third Origine-inspired painting
and vinyl records propped up on the floor: a conspicuous display
of cool. the door, though, wouldn’t open. if thomas succeeded,
you wanted to go in or at least see more. but you couldn’t.
in an interview with Melandri in the exhibition catalogue,
thomas insists that her flashy artistic style is more complicated
than bling. 1 She claims that she means to interrogate the
nature of artifice and beauty, how self-presentation occurs
through costume and pretense. it’s very easy, however, to
find thomas’s big, glimmering artworks guilty of the same
ostentation they apparently scrutinize.
her most iconic and publicly viewed painting to date, shown
in the brooklyn iteration of “origin” but not in Santa Monica,
is the three-panel Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes
Noires (2010). commissioned by the Museum of Modern art,
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new york, for the street-level window of its 53rd Street restaurant,
the Modern, the work replaces the three main figures in the famous
1863 Manet with fashionable black women. With its immense
scale and glittering surface, the piece is decidedly showier than its
namesake. it also calls to mind artist delia brown’s cordoned-off,
staged parties or ongoing “Guerrilla Lounging” project, for which
she and several friends invade collectors’ homes (with permission)
in order to kick back for photographs that she later paints,
usually in watercolor, capturing fantasies of the high life. for Le
déjeuner, thomas used friends as models, posing them in the
sculpture garden at MoMa one summer evening. the painted
scene appears impossibly fabulous, and for two years (from february
2010 to March 2012, after a large photographic version of
the composition was exhibited in the window for the year before)
served as window dressing for the upscale restaurant.
thoMaS’S neaR-conStant fixation on female beauty can be
monotonous, and her reason for revisiting well-known artworks
of the past remains unclear. even so, her showpiece A Little
Taste Outside of Love (2007) thrills. this 9-by-12-foot image
of an african-american odalisque, in rhinestones, acrylic and
enamel on wood, is usually seen sparkling triumphantly at the
entrance to the contemporary wing of the brooklyn Museum
and appears in only that museum’s edition of “origin.” Riffing
on ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814), the painting portrays a
nude black woman with a big afro reclining on an array of artfully
mismatched patterned fabrics—floral, zebra, panther—set
against a golden ground. the comely concubine appears more
decorative and arguably more majestic than ingres’s.
this spread, two views of Take All the
Time You Need, mixed-medium installation,
at the Santa Monica Museum of art.
Photo Monica orozco.
LIkE dUchAMP’S ÉTAnT dOnnÉs, ThOMAS’S INSTALLATION TAke ALL
The Time YOu need INVOLVEd VIEwING BY PEEPhOLE.
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Like the recumbent figures in courbet’s Origine and
duchamp’s Étant donnés, ingres’s nude has been the subject
of a raft of criticism and speculation. ingres depicted a
woman as he wished to see her—in an anatomically impossible
way. her spine has a few too many vertebrae, her hips
and back twist unrealistically, and her arms are of different
lengths. thomas follows suit and creates a physically
implausible figure, the rhinestones suggesting that she does
so happily, in the spirit of celebration. that both this piece
and thomas’s Le déjeuner are in the collections of major art
institutions may be due partly to the fact that they appear
bold and rebellious, replacing white figures with women of
color, while not exactly upsetting the art history to which
they refer. Such pieces only reaffirm the white-male-centric
canon, if updating or recasting its masterworks.
another issue, this one running throughout her body of
work, is that thomas often partakes in blatant objectification,
an act that does not necessarily chafe less for being
performed by someone who is herself a woman of color.
an especially egregious example is her performance at
a 2009 event for the art-dessert company Kreëmart and
the american Patrons of tate, held at haunch of Venison
gallery in new york. thomas hired several black women
to coquettishly offer cake to guests while wearing nothing
but red hot pants, white kneesocks and red stilettos. no
one was given a piece without figuring out and uttering the
artist’s secret “password,” which was actually a lyric—“oh,
Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine, you blow my mind”—
from the ’80s dance anthem by toni basil. (Perhaps this
event is what inspired fellow fundraiser participant Marina
abramović to cast live performers as naked table decorations
for the 2011 Los angeles Museum of contemporary
art gala. abramović’s ill-conceived performance also featured
Kreëmart cakes: one modeled on the artist herself,
the other on debbie harry, both naked.) the feminist in
me bristles not at the idea that thomas might enjoy the
sight of a bevy of stunning women with cake. Rather, it’s
hard to abide the spectacle of an overwhelmingly white
crowd being served by black women who were there,
half-naked, at thomas’s bidding. While provoking the art
establishment can be an excellent objective for an artist,
this particular, grotesque display exploited performers—
despite their willingness—along racial and gender lines, in
service of thomas as a bona fide art star.
the “oRiGin” exhibition does, however, offer recent,
refreshing departures from thomas’s beautiful-black-womenin-rhinestones
formula. in figure-less, though still rhinestoneembellished,
renderings of modernist homes and landscapes,
the artist further proves her command of color and composition.
Interior: Blue Couch with Green Owl (2012) depicts an
interior space with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a
vista of pale blue and green. furnishings include a couple of
bertoia chairs, a handsome owl sculpture and a welcoming
bowl of pears. Geometric swaths of blue, pink and black add
depth of field through the varying viscosities of acrylic, oil and
enamel paint. foliage gets the royal rhinestone treatment in
Landscape with Tree (2012), which also incorporates collaged
Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, 2012,
acrylic, oil, enamel and rhinestones on
panel, 108 by 240 inches.
areas suggesting mountains and sky, earth and air intermingled.
chunks of black, pink and green embolden the whole, the background
and foreground overlapping and becoming indistinguishable.
Landscape with Ocean (2012) evokes Richard neutra’s or
Rudolph Schindler’s californian architecture, filtered through the
style of Romare bearden’s late collages of the tropics, made after
he moved to Saint Martin in the 1960s. in these, bearden began
exploring new concepts of space and composition related to his
studies with a chinese calligrapher, and produced perspectival
shifts that defy conventional Western logic.
thomas performs a similar spatial feat in Sleep: Deux Femmes
Noires (2012), a 9-by-20-foot painting after courbet’s Sommeil
(Sleep), 1866. included at both exhibition venues, thomas’s
work, like its predecessor, portrays two nude women entwined
and sleeping. Weird and spellbinding, and by far the most intimate
and revelatory piece on view, Sleep gives the impression
wEIrd ANd SPELLBINdING, sLeep: deux Femmes nOires IS BY fAr ThE MOST
INTIMATE ANd rEVELATOrY PIEcE ON VIEw.
of a dreamscape imagined by the two women, their eyes closed,
both gorgeous but neither posing. one, very dark-skinned, has
fire-orange hair and gray lips. She lies on her back, limbs twisted
around a partner whose red lips offset her honey-hued skin and
whose long blue locks fall across her shoulders. both figures
have been composed, seemingly devotionally, with plenty of
rhinestones. the background amalgamates many trees, leaves
and perspectival fields. neon orange areas zigzag throughout,
suggesting cracks in the composition. Portions of sky, some
pink, some blue, imply that the picture brings together multiple
moments. Patches of boldly mismatched patterns call to mind
quilts. in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, thomas
manifests a few playful swatches of Lichtenstein-esque dots.
More than any other work in the show, Sleep demonstrates
that thomas has such talent that she doesn’t need to recapitulate
the past, either in terms of reconfiguring old masterworks or
using pretty females as conceptual stand-ins. her extraordinary
skill is more than enough to stake a claim in the history of
art and carry her career into an electrifying second act.
1 “Points of origin: an interview With Mickalene thomas
by Lisa Melandri,” Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,
ed. Lisa Melandri, Santa Monica, calif., Santa Monica
Museum of art, 2012, p. 31.
“Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe” debuted at the Santa
Monica Museum of Art, Calif., Apr. 14-Aug. 25. The exhibition
appears in expanded form at the Brooklyn Museum, N.Y., through
Jan. 20, 2013. Additionally, an exhibition of Thomas’s work will be on
view at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, Nov. 1-Jan. 5, 2013.
Sarah Valdez is a longtime contributor to Art in America.
She lives in Los angeles and new york.
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