New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. Thomas introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape and still life.

Inspired by various sources that range from the 19th century Hudson River School to Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Romare Bearden, she continues to explore notions of beauty from a contemporary perspective infused with the more recent influences of popular culture and Pop Art.

RESUME:

MICKALENE THOMAS
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

EDUCATION
2002 MFA in Painting, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT
2000 BFA in Painting, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1998 Southern Cross University, Lismore Australia

RESIDENCIES
2011 Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program, Giverny, France
2010 Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO
2010 Durham Press, Durham, PA
2003 Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
2001 Vermont Studios Center, Johnson, VT
1999 Yale Norfolk Summer of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT

MUSEUM SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2012
"Origin of the Universe" Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA

2012
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

2011
"Mickalene Thomas - Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two" Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan

2010
"Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl" Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, CA

2009
"Mickalene Thomas" Alumni Achievement Award Exhibition, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

"Something You Can Feel" La Conservera Contemporary Art Space, Ceuti, Spain
2008
"What's Love Got To Do With It?" Bloom Projects, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum,

AWARDS
2012 Asher B. Duran Award, Brooklyn Museum of Art
2010 Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts
2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant;
Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award
2007 Rema Hort Mann Grant
2002 Barry Cohen Scholarship, Yale University
2001 Paul Harper Fellowship, Yale University
2000 Presidential Merit Scholarship, Yale University
1999 Elizabeth Stokel Battell Fellowship, Yale University
1998 Pratt Institute Student Leadership Award
1995-97 Pratt Institute Black Alumni Scholarship

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
21c Museum
The Akron Art Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago
Brooklyn Museum
The Guggenheim Museum, New York
The International Center of Photography
Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Modern Art
National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
New York Public Library
The Rubell Family Collection
San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art Sender Collection
The Studio Museum of Harlem
Taschen Collection
The Mikki and Stanley Weithorn Collection
Whitney Museum of American
Art West Collection
Yale University

Source:
Website of the Artist, 2013

Influenced by Lacanian psychology as much as by the glam aesthetics of 1970s Blaxploitation films, artist Mickalene Thomas subverts conventional canonical formats to unravel notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Thomas’s complex works incorporate a wide range of media including rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel to create richly layered collage-like compositions that explore the inner natures of her sitters against the contradictions and misconceptions of identity.

She produces portraits of African American women using vocabularies of the art historical canon and contemporary celebrity photography to render her subjects as powerful agents of their identities. Often depicting her sitters, whom the artist frequently refers to as “muses,” in the poses of the odalisques of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Édouard Manet, Thomas subverts traditional forms of representation and presents a complex and empathetic vision of the myriad experiences of Black woman in contemporary America.

Her sitters return the viewer’s gaze, supercharging their potent presences. Thomas came to making art under precipitous circumstances; inspired by a retrospective of the work of Carrie Mae Weems while she was studying law in Portland, Oregon, Thomas has since devoted herself to exploring identity in visual terms. Her work incorporates a huge variety of influences, from Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse to Weems and Kehinde Wiley, and has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.