Brooklyn-based artist Mickalene Thomas recasts art historical genre painting—odalisques, bathers, still lifes, and landscapes—with Black female bodies. Her pastiches of Ingres, Matisse, and Courbet picture her lovers and late mother, subverting the canon’s ideals by offering images of feminine and queer desire, family, and community. Known for her collaged canvases adorned with rhinestones and glitter, as well as for her photography and installations, Thomas creates lavish and densely patterned settings for her muses. These compositions at once conjure 1970s Blaxploitation films, Romare Bearden’s collage, the ornamentation of the Pattern and Decoration movement, and the studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé, assembling multiple perspectives into a singular, bold aesthetic.

Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971, Thomas received a BFA from Pratt Institute (2000) and an MFA from Yale University (2002). Since her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, opened at the Brooklyn Museum (2012), the artist’s work has been the subject of presentations at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2019); Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2019); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2017); Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans (2017); and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017); among others. From 2015 to 2019, MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête, organized by the Aperture Foundation, traveled to six venues. Her work resides in such collections as the Akron Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Among her many honors, including a 2012 Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, in 2008 she created the first portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama.