Although she’s best known for her vibrant and textural collage portraits of Black women, contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas is in fact a master of many mediums, including photography, video, sculpture and printmaking. Born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised by her mother, a fashion model, Thomas enrolled in after-school art classes at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City as a child. Later, she would earn fine art degrees from Pratt Institute and Yale University.
Inspired in part by her strong, matriarchal upbringing and her own identity as a queer Black woman, Thomas focuses on female power, beauty and sexuality in her works. She cites a 1990s-era exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems’s work at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon as being critically important to her becoming an artist. In her work, Thomas commonly pulls from the art history canon, riffing frequently on the styles and compositions of early modernists such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, as well as more contemporary artists like Romare Bearden and David Hockney. She recontextualizes their paintings by restaging them with Black subjects, using signature materials like rhinestones, enamel and acrylic paint to profound effect. Relatedly, for a collaboration with Dior, Thomas reinvented the house’s iconic Bar jacket and Lady Dior handbag to become, essentially, wearable Claude Monet landscapes.
Thomas also investigates the idea of Black celebrity in her work, painting portraits of such Black icons as Whitney Houston, Oprah Winfrey and Eartha Kitt. In 2008, Thomas painted the first individual silkscreen portrait of then–First Lady Michelle Obama, which was exhibited for the first time in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Americans Now” show.
Thomas’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. She has received such accolades as the Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts in 2010, the Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award in 2012 and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2013. In 2015, Thomas was named a USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow.
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Mickalene Thomas
By Phaidon
Located in New York, NY
Over the past two decades, Mickalene Thomas's critically acclaimed and extensive body of work has spanned painting, collage, photography, video, and the immersive installations that ...
Paper
Wilhelm Sasnal Untitled Print, 2011
Located in New York, NY
Wilhelm Sasnal is one of the most celebrated artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in the twenty-first century. His practice embraces drawing, film, com...
Paper
Bharti Kher Grey Not Black, Not White Limited Edition Print
By Phaidon
Located in New York, NY
Print: Full color digital archival print on Epson hot press natural 330g/m2 Size: 610 x 508 mm (24 x 20 in) Edition of 100 This work will come with a signed and numbered archival ...
Paper
Sarah Sze: Paintings
Located in New York, NY
The first and only monograph to give a comprehensive examination of acclaimed American artist Sarah Sze's painting practice Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a signatu...
Paper
Sarah Sze Images in Debris Limited Edition Print
By Phaidon
Located in New York, NY
Archival pigment print on Moab Entrada 290gsm Measures: 23.75 x 18.75 in 60.3 x 47.6 cm Edition of 100 This work is signed and numbered by the artist, (2016) Images in Debris depicts time lapse photographs of the sky, taken by the artist, at sunrise and sunset. The images, captured digitally, are then printed via a 4-color screen printing process. Each color separation is screen printed and then smeared while the ink is still wet, foregrounding a handmade process that involves tactility, registration, wetness, and specificity of touch. The images of the sun at dusk and dawn are at once universal and highly specific, recording a period of time on a particular day and in a particular place. By objectively recording the images and then breaking them apart and putting them back together, Sze explores the fragility of time passing and our desire for intimacy and touch in the face of both overwhelming natural forces and the ubiquitous images that surround us daily. Sarah Sze...
Paper
Lubaina Himid: Theatre of the Divine Limited Edition Print
By Phaidon
Located in New York, NY
Print: Full color digital archival print on Epson Hot Press Natural 330g/m2 Size: 610 x 508 mm (24 x 20 in) Edition of 100 This work will come with a signed and numbered archival label adhered to the back of the print. (2019) Produced with the support of Kering, a global luxury group committed to the empowerment of women, this charitable limited-edition print is part of a portfolio celebrating Phaidon's Great Women Artists, the most extensive illustrated book on women artists ever published. The book tells the stories of over 400 artists spanning 500 years and reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a great diversity of voices. The Great Women Artists print portfolio offers collectors the opportunity to acquire affordable works by some of the most celebrated and sought-after women artists of our time, while contributing to a worthy cause. A pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and '90s, Lubaina Himid...
Paper
MICKALENE THOMAS "UNTITLED" (BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL) USA, 2017
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in Pembroke Pines, FL
Mickalene Thomas "Untitled" (Black is Beautiful) USA, 2017 Inkjet print Signed and numbered by the artist From an edition of 100 14"H 11"W (work) Framed Approx: 22"H x 17"W Excellent...
Inkjet
Mickalene Thomas - Maya #10
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in London, GB
Maya, 2024 UV pigment print on 410gsm Somerset Tub Sized Radiant White paper with 4 metallic silkscreen glitter and shimmer layers, a CMYK silkscreen central panel and matte varnish ...
Pigment, Screen
Mickalene Thomas Lovely Six Foota Signed Archival Print Limited Edition of 25
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in Minneapolis, MN
Artist: Mickalene Thomas Title: Lovely Six Foota Medium: Archival Pigment Print on Wove Paper Size: 16.125" x 20" Edition: 3/25 Inscription: Signed, titled, dated and numbered on ver...
Paper, Archival Pigment
Jet Blue in Landscape
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in New Canaan, CT
This edition was created specifically for The Glass House Art Editions Program. Every artwork purchased contributes to preservation projects on site and allows us to provide engaging...
Enamel, Steel
Tiffona Lisa #2
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in Toronto, Ontario
Mickalene Thomas (b.1971) is an American artist exploring the intersection of popular culture and art history, through a contemporary Black female gaze. As an openly gay Black woman,...
Ceramic
Portrait of a Lovely Six Foota #1
By Mickalene Thomas
Located in Fort Lauderdale, FL
Mickalene Thomas Portrait of a Lovely Six Foota #1, 2009, (24/50 + 5 AP) Archival Pigment Print 14 x 11 in Published by The Lapis Press, to benefit the Institute of Contemporary Art...
Archival Pigment
