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Mickalene Thomas Mickalene Thomas makes paintings, collages, photography, videos, and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Background

She is a distinguished multidisciplinary visual artist best known for combining art historical, political, and pop-cultural references to create striking figurative and nonfigurative paintings.

Inspiration

Mickalene Thomas inspiration is from multiple artistic periods and cultural influences throughout Western art history, particularly the early modernists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, and Romare Bearden. She models her figures on the classic poses and abstract settings popularized by these modern masters as a way to reclaim agency for women who have been presented as objects to be desired or subjugated. Though Thomas draws from a number of time periods and genres, her use of pattern and domestic spaces often references various periods throughout the 1960s to the 1980s. This was a time of immense social and political conflict, change, and transformation—the civil rights movement, the black is beautiful movement, and the second wave of feminism during which many women, particularly African-Americans, rejected and redefined traditional standards of beauty. Work

Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized: - The Dayton Art Institute, OH (forthcoming, 2018)

- Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (forthcoming, 2018)

- Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (forthcoming, 2018)

- Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (forthcoming, 2017)

- Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA (2017)

- Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2017)

- Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016)

- Aspen Art Museum, CO (2016); Aperture Foundation, New York (2016)

- George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2014); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012-13)

- Santa Monica Museum of Art (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012)

- Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011)

- La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Ceuti, Spain (2009)

Awards

- Thomas has been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2013); Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012); and the Timehri Award for Leadership in the Arts (2010).

References

Vogel, C. (2019, December 3). The Rise and Rise of Mickalene Thomas. Town & Country. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a29762435/mickalene-thomas-artist-interview/

Thomas, Mickalene | Encyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Thomas, Mickalene 1971— Artist. https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/thomas-mickalene

Mickalene Thomas - Artists - Lehmann Maupin. (n.d.). Mickalene Thomas. https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/mickalene-thomas

Mickalene Thomas Biography. (n.d.). Mickalene Thomas. https://fac.umass.edu/UMCA_DIOT/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=DIOTMickaleneThomasBiography&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=#:%7E:text=Mickalene%20Thomas%20was%20born%20in,striking%20figurative%20and%20nonfigurative%20paintings.