Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Galerie

Geoff Montes

A constant source of surprise and delight.

Wallpaper*

Hannah Silver

The [works'] sheer physicality, and the powerful self-possession of the subject, challenge the viewer to engage with the Black woman who stands boldly in front of her domestic environment.

British Journal of Photography

Elisa Medde

I admire how, not only pose, but also materials come into play in her works as adorning elements – when I look at her works, in whatever medium they were made, words such as celebration, beauty, pleasure come to mind.

Juxtapoz

Ed Schad

She moves a muse from making them feel comfortable in an environment into a photograph, into a collage, into a painting. And now, with recent works into a variety of mediums, whether silkscreen or dye sublimation print or neon or sculpture, it’s a matter of renewed engagement, renewed looking at people she cares deeply about.

Rolling Stone

Larisha Paul

Thomas places her art at the center of a conversation between sexuality, erotica, and memory. She asks complex questions about identity, digs into family history, and at times becomes the subject of her own work.

Cultured

Essence Harden

Thomas’s 'All About Love' is a meditation of sorts, certainly on love but also the particular realms in which love lives and can be wielded, through a deep consideration of place, movement, and a tending to Black queer possibilities.

W Magazine

Tara Dalbow

Thomas reimagines our broken world restored by love, color, and sequence...From broken down barriers and shattered expectations, she reconstitutes a new reality where, in hooks's words, 'love’s sacred presence can be felt everywhere.'

Forbes: Media

Chadd Scott

Thomas has been depicting Black women at their best–glamourous, assured, sexy–for 20 years, artworks now found hanging alongside those of the white women which have always occupied America’s most prestigious art museums.

Them

Wren Sanders

Her painted portraits, glimmering with the elegance of an affectionate gaze, present equally forceful reflections of the artist’s love.

Artforum

Eve Hill-Agnus

Delivers an optimistic message: that memorializing (a mother or a movement) might be a way to love, that complexity might constitute wholeness, that a trajectory can ever be complete.

CBS : Sunday Morning

Tracy Smith

When you walk into the world of Mickalene Thomas, prepare to be dazzled.

Essence

Okla Jones

... [an] extraordinary observation of family, community, and love.

Hyperallergic

Alexis Clements

In a society where identity formation is a cultural obsession, and is intimately linked to perceptions of beauty and stylishness, it is unsurprising that [Mickalene Thomas's] work not only traverses art, fashion, and popular culture, but that it is connected to each of them at its core.

Art Plugged

Thomas has redefined beauty and identity through her vibrant and dynamic compositions.

Alta

Shaquille Heath

These living room installations welcome you into the interior spaces where Black women find their sexualities and desires ... It's also a space where they can be confident, heal and mend. These are spaces where they love and are loved.

New York Magazine: The Cut

Maggie Lange

If the rhinestone is artist Mickalene Thomas’s signature material, then exuberance is the signature spirit. Along with their sparkle, Thomas’s monumental artworks contain other hallmarks: stately women posed in bold patterned fabric with perfect posture and firm gazes.

The New York Review of Books

Carolina A. Miranda

Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.

The Philadelphia Sun

Teresa Emerson

With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas’s art is characterized by spectacularly staged, rhinestoned, large-scale painted tableaux and bold, intimate compositions, decisively foregrounding Black femininity in abundant realms of visual pleasure, agency, and kinship. This major survey publication further affirms Thomas’s status as a key figure of contemporary art.

NPR: Fresh Air

Tonya Mosley

The scale of Thomas' paintings, often made of unconventional materials like glitter, sequins, and yarn, makes them feel larger than life, with the eyes of her subjects gazing directly at the viewer.

The Los Angeles Times

Christopher Knight

Her work builds on a simple but trenchant observation: In the long history of Western painting, monumental portraits of Black women are almost nonexistent. Most of Thomas’ paintings pile on vivid color, brash patterning and lots of sparkling rhinestones, taking an exultant step toward rectifying the omission.

Observer

Dan Duray

With around fifty works from two decades of her career, the show offers a focused look at [Mickalene Thomas's] practice and compelling dialogues with works by Monet, Picasso and Courbet.

The Gay & Lesbian Review

Reginald Harris

Arranged in thematic chapters, 'All About Love' takes the reader through all aspects of Mickalene Thomas’extensive œuvre, reproducing images spanning painting, collage,print, photography, video, and immersive installations.

Dazed

Lydia Figes

Assembling monumental portraits of Black, female figures in repose, rest and leisure – a theme that the artist regards as radical and plays upon the work of European artists firmly established in the Western canon – the show offers a celebratory vision of the lives of Black women while referencing the omissions of art history.

AnOther Magazine

Martha Alexander

The Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery is set to be totally transformed by Mickalene Thomas’ large-scale, jewel encrusted, intricately patterned portraits, all with a 1970s aesthetic that speaks to the American artist’s childhood in New Jersey. The work interrogates notions of what it means to be beautiful, powerful and loved: the title of this show is in honour of the late feminist writer bell hooks.

Huck magazine

Sara Rosen

Half a century later, 'Evidence' has become canon without losing any of its charge. The questions it poses of photography’s role as a tool of propaganda to uphold systems of power feels all too timely in our brave new world.

The New Statesman

Michael Prodger

Thomas makes her surfaces of powerful black women glitter with sequins as they offer a challenge to the viewer.

New York Magazine: Vulture

Jerry Saltz

The paintings of Mickalene Thomas are big, bold, gaudy, and beautiful, embedded with rhinestones, daubed with phosphorescent color, and composed like crazy quilts.