Mickalene Thomas: All About Love @ The Broad, Los Angeles + Other Venues

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

The Broad, Los Angeles

May 25 - September 29, 2024

Mickalene Thomas 

Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2023 

Rhinestones, acrylic and glitter on canvas mounted on

wood panel. 90 x 110 in (228.6 x 279.4 cm) 

© Mickalene Thomas

The Broad announces the launch of a new touring special exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of this pioneering artist’s work. Marking its debut at The Broad with over 80 works made by the artist over the last 20 years, the exhibition highlights how Thomas has mastered and innovated within several disciplines, from mixed-media painting and collage to installation and photography. The exhibition shares its title and several of its themes with the pivotal text by feminist author bell hooks, in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation.

Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Mickalene Thomas completed her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. Soon after she became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose using rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolizes the complexities of femininity. Depicting women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Similarly, Mickalene Thomas’s photographs, collages, and figurative paintings often re-stage scenes from 19th century French painters such as Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet, pushing back against the subjugation and oppressive narratives upheld by Western archives, cultural institutions, and representation systems.

“In Mickalene Thomas’s hands, collage becomes a way of thinking about love in a serious way,” said Ed Schad, Curator at The Broad. “As Thomas keeps the essence of individuals alive in her work – as the individuals are re-imagined and remade, configured from different moods and different circumstances over many years of trust and commitment – it is a love ethic she is after.”

The Broad’s debut of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love reflects some of the artist’s earliest inquiries into visual culture, sexuality, memory, and erotica and move into the present. On view will be the early photographic triptych, Lounging, Standing, Looking (2003), a piece which depicts the artist’s own mother, exploring kinship and care. These modes of intimate relations come to inform work such as Portrait of Maya No. 10 (2017) from the Broad collection. This acrylic and rhinestone work embodies Thomas’s signature ability to apply several layers of material and symbolic meaning into a single surface. At eight feet tall, the subject is empowered, sparkled, and poised, commanding her outward gaze.

The exhibition is largely populated by works at this immersive and ambitious scale, such as the twelve-foot wide I’m Feelin Good (2014) which also uses rhinestone elements. Unifying these larger-than-life subjects together in the museum’s galleries will envelop viewers into the bold and dynamic universe the artist has created, where steadfast love overcomes political strife. In addition to towering wall works, video collages such as Angelitos Negros (2016) will also be presented. This work immortalizes the late singer and actress Eartha Kitt, who sings about the absence of Black angels in art history, reflecting a core theme within the exhibition. Through her queries into pop culture and mass media, Mickalene Thomas offers a reverberating demand for Black women to be seen and understood, and for viewers to become what hooks calls “practitioners of love.”

A publication accompanies the exhibition, including Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Hayward Gallery Chief Curator, Rachel Thomas, and essays by Claudia Rankine, Darnell L. Moore, Ed Schad, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, TK Smith, and Christine Kim that cover Thomas’s distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of love, intergenerational female empowerment, and tenets of Black feminist theory. 

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change @ The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia & Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change
The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
February 21 - May 9, 2016
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
June - ..., 2016

The Barnes Foundation, in partnership with the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, premieres Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change. On view February 21 through May 9, 2016 at the Barnes, the exhibition will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art in June. Curated by Simonetta Fraquelli, an independent curator and specialist in early twentieth-century European art, the exhibition explores Pablo Picasso’s work between 1912 and 1924, highlighting the tumultuous years of the First World War, when the artist began to alternate between cubist and classical modes in his art.

Inspired by the Columbus Museum of Art’s Picasso Still Life with Compote and Glass, 1914-15 and the Barnes’s extensive Picasso holdings, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change features some 50 works by Picasso drawn from major American and European museums and private collections. The show includes oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and four costumes the artist designed for the avant-garde ballet, Parade, in 1917. Some 15 other important canvases by Picasso’s contemporaries—including Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and Diego Rivera—will also be presented.

“A radical shift occurred in Picasso’s work in 1914,” notes curator Simonetta Fraquelli. “Following seven years of refining the visual language of cubism, he began to introduce elements of naturalism to his work.” This change in his production can be viewed against the backdrop of an unsteady cultural climate in Paris during the First World War. Many people identified the fragmented forms of cubism with the German enemy and therefore perceived it as unpatriotic. This negative impression reverberated throughout Paris during the First World War and may have been a factor in Picasso’s shift in styles. However, Fraquelli states, “What becomes evident when looking at Picasso’s work between 1914 and 1924, is that his two artistic styles—Cubism and Neoclassicism—are not antithetical; on the contrary, each informs the other, to the degree that the metamorphosis from one style to the other is so natural for the artist that occasionally they occur in the same works of art.”

Included in the exhibition will be major works from the Picasso museums in Barcelona, Málaga, and Paris, including, respectively: Woman with a Mantilla (Fatma), oil and charcoal on canvas, 1917; Olga Kholklova with a Mantilla, oil on canvas, 1917; and Femme Assise, oil on canvas, 1920. 

The exhibition also features four costumes that Picasso designed for the avant-garde ballet, Parade, which premiered in Paris in 1917. These are: Costume for Chinese Conjurer (original), and reproductions of The American Manager, The French Manager, and The Horse. Performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with music by Erik Satie, story by Jean Cocteau and the choreography of Léonide Massine, Parade was the first cross-disciplinary collaboration of its kind. The ballet, which tells the story of an itinerant theater group performing a sideshow, or a parade, was viewed as a revolutionary approach to theater. Picasso was the first avant-garde artist involved in such a production – not only designing the costumes, but also the theater curtain and set. Included in the exhibition will be a watercolor and graphite sketch of the curtain design, and a pencil sketch of the Costume for Chinese Conjurer. Picasso drew inspiration for his designs from the modern world – everything from circuses and carousels, to music halls and the cinema. With Picasso’s inventive, geometric costumes and naturalistic curtain design, Parade can be seen as the ultimate fusion of cubist and classical forms.

Picasso’s juxtaposition of figurative and cubist techniques can be seen as an expression of artistic freedom during a time of great conflict, and his shifts in style became a means of not repeating, in his words, “the same vision, the same technique, the same formula.” The works by Picasso’s contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera’s Still Life with Bread Knife from 1915 and Henri Matisse’s Lorette in a Red Jacket from 1917, offer further insight into the shifting cultural climate in France during this transformative period.

Managing Curator for Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change at the Barnes Foundation is Martha Lucy. Managing Curator at the Columbus Museum of Art is Chief Curator, David Stark.

THE BARNES FOUNDATION
www.barnesfoundation.org