The artist Mickalene Thomas and her dream to make a difference

When you enter the world of Mickalene Thomas, you will be dazzled. The 53-year-old artist uses rhinestones, collage, screen printing and video to create pieces that celebrate women – proud, confident and powerful.

She is perhaps best known for her reinterpretations of classics, such as “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe,” an interpretation of the paintings of the same name by Pablo Picasso and Edouard Manet. “Our history is always shaped by ideas that exclude truths and people,” says Thomas. “And so I began to question that.”

Thomas shifted the focus to women she finds beautiful. Her muses are sometimes famous, more often not: “The everyday black woman who should be celebrated; the women on the street, the women who work, but who at the same time exude this excellence of confidence and pride, vulnerability and strength.”

“Like all great artists, she has an understanding and a sense of what great historical artists do, and she says, ‘Okay, I’m going to flip this, I’m going to make it my own,'” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, where the exhibition “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” is on view. “She’s completely changing who is the center of traditional Western (especially European) painting. And she’s centering black women, she’s centering queer women and queer identities, and she’s doing it with these beautiful works with glitter and rhinestones that are literally bringing light and illumination into those lives.”

The exhibition begins with a life-size replica of the row houses in Camden, New Jersey, where Thomas grew up.

She knew early on that she wanted to make a difference, so she studied law in college. “Why not think about becoming a lawyer and changing some necessary laws in this country?” she laughed.

She said the goal was to “change the world.” That was until one day she visited a museum and saw the “Kitchen Table Series,” a series of photographs by renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems. “That moment when I saw those photos in the museum, I knew I wanted to be an artist,” Thomas said. “That was it. That’s what art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to move you. It’s supposed to inspire you. And if we don’t see ourselves in pictures, we don’t know what’s possible.”

Smith asked, “So you knew you wanted to make art. Did you know at that point that you could make a living doing it?”

“You’re funny!” laughed Thomas. “No!”

In fact, her mix of media was born at least partly out of necessity, like her signature rhinestones, which are applied one at a time and can number in the thousands on a single piece. “Oil paint is very expensive,” Thomas said. “So I used what was around me, what was accessible, what was affordable. And sometimes those were materials that other people were throwing away: ‘Okay, I can’t afford paint. But I’ll work with these things.’

“A lot of my processes are based on constraints. But my life has always been about constraints and working within them, around them, through them and beyond them.”

“About” is correct, her works can now be found in museums all over the world.

And it wasn’t until May of this year, when she was honored by the Gordon Parks Foundation in New York, that Thomas’s life came full circle. The recipient was Carrie Mae Weems, the artist whose work inspired her to change her life path 30 years ago.

Mickalene Thomas didn’t become a lawyer, but her dream of making a difference still came true. “Having an idea, taking that idea, putting it through yourself, making it happen and creating something that the world or a group of people responds to, that’s life, right?” Thomas said.That is change the world.”

For more information:

Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Steven Tyler.

See also: