MICKALENE THOMAS

Words Gary Lippman Photos Guzman

Originally published in No 8.

“Certain artists,” Duke Ellington once said, “are beyond category,” and this description applies perfectly to Mickalene Thomas. Arriving recently at a party at Legacy Records, a hip restaurant in NYC, I noticed a large photograph displayed on the wall and I promptly fell into a trance. Entitled Remember Me, the photograph portrays a young gorgeous African-American woman named Maya. The spell I’d fallen under, thanks to the portrait, wasn’t sexual or romantic. No, it was aesthetic — and so potent that I felt whooshed, body and soul, into Maya’s Blaxploitation-styled world. For a few heady moments, I imagined myself seated beside her on her funky yellow sofa in front of a purple wall decorated with Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross record albums, some in their sleeves and some just naked vinyl. Coincidentally the artist responsible for this fever dream photograph was Thomas, whom I had just been assigned to interview for this feature. But I should have expected serendipity when it comes to Thomas, since she is nothing if not magical.

When I visited her few days later, Thomas welcomed me into her light-drenched Brooklyn studio with laughter, some witty remarks, and a spirited manner that matched her playful, sometimes ecstatic art. She said that from the get-go at art school (Thomas received degrees from Pratt and Yale), she was mad about painting, falling “in love with the way oil paint smells, the mixing of colors, the desire of making something… It was like a first date.” 

The playfulness of Thomas’s paintings extends to their materials, which include such unserious stuff such as glitter, sequins and rhinestones. As for those paintings’ influences, they cover the proverbial waterfront, informed as they variously are by African masks, Haitian voodoo flags, Aboriginal abstraction, formal Western art tradition and low pop-culture grooviness. 

While continuing to paint, Thomas soon began making those mise-en-scène photographs of hers (often posed portraits in the vein of Remember Me). She’s artistically diverse, too. Take one cursory peek at her engaging website and you’ll see that Thomas is ambitious with and accomplished in collages, sculpture, film, album covers (Solange’s True from 2013), and furniture with deliciously mismatched patterns that she creates for her installations. Many of these installations looking like rec rooms from her ‘70s-era New Jersey childhood that have been transmogrified into psychedelic playgrounds. 

During the past decade, solo exhibitions of Thomas’s work have appeared in galleries and museums worldwide. She was also commissioned to create the first artistic image of Michelle Obama as First Lady. What’s more, Thomas has posed for other artists, most notably her comrade Kehinde Wiley, as the feathers-in-her-hair-and-hand-on-her-heart Coyote in his Trickster series. 

Painting remains the form that Thomas is most “comfortable” with. “I love the energy, the buzz that I get from transforming onto this 2D surface, the gesture, the physicality, the movement, and the viscosity of the paint, it’s intoxicating.” As with painting someone’s portrait, a photo shoot is for Thomas a truly “put-your-whole-body-into-it” process. “I use the camera like a brush, it’s my apparatus. I have the same physicality except I’m moving with tripod in hand, searching for the right composition. Some of my production team get tickled by watching me because I’m very flexible and I’m not opposed to getting in the same positions I ask my sitters to do. I’m all over the place when there’s excitement and synergy. That adrenaline rush is everythang!” 

Inevitably, perhaps, the content of Thomas’s work is as protean and surprising as are her choices of media. She’s not one of Wiley’s artistic Tricksters just by chance! 

The Harlem Museum’s director Thelma Golden suggests a starting point for approaching that multivalent content with her statement that Thomas “pays tribute to artistic depictions of women as she draws on an astonishing and inspired range of esthetic, historical and social references.”  

By portraying African-American women of different moods, shapes, and states of dress, or undress, in varying settings and physical positions, Thomas wants to amaze and delight us, sure, but she also wants us to think complicated thoughts about female presentation, “self” and otherwise, as well as gender, race, sexuality, identity vs. stereotypes, artifice vs. honesty, and vulnerability vs. power. What does it mean for each model to be gazing at us while we gaze at her? And how does one’s own gender function in the act of our gazing and being gazed at in return? Queried once if she would ever feature men in her portraits, Thomas replied, “How do you know I haven’t?”

Then there’s the matter of fashion and glamour, which are central to Thomas’s work, focused as it is on “masking and layering, dressing up and beautifying yourself — and what that means for black women.” Metamorphosis is key — a muse for Thomas is usually a woman of color “who has overcome some obstacles in her life and transformed.” 

To serve as a muse for Thomas, you can’t be a stranger; having an intimate connection with the artist is crucial. With Muse, her 2016 book and exhibit at the Aperture Foundation, Thomas focused the viewer’s attention on the four people she has most consistently rendered throughout her career, her four most vital muses: Maya, an ex-girlfriend; Racquel Chevremont, her current life and work partner — who is an art collector, consultant, and a former fashion model; and Sandra ‘Mama’ Bush, Thomas’s late mother, who was likewise a successful model before she worked in a New Jersey public school as a special services administrator. 

And the fourth muse? It’s Thomas herself, who launched her artistic explorations by making self-portraits, including a performance art piece at Yale in which she created Quanikah, an urban-kid alter ego who befuddled her faculty and fellow students alike. Ultimately, Thomas took “her self out” of the pictures because she felt that too much narcissism was creeping in.

The love Thomas feels for her muses is evident in the work — she’s quick to label her creative relationship with her subjects “collaborative” — and one muse holds number one status: her mother, whom she featured in Happy Birthday To A Beautiful Woman: A Portrait Of My Mother, the loving short film Thomas made in 2014. Mama Bush died not long after it first aired on HBO.

Her mother had been a caring parent, raising Thomas and her brother as Buddhists in Camden and Newark while she worked to support them. Nevertheless, as Bush explains in the film’s unflinching interview segments, she fell prey to abusive male partners and drug addiction. And although Thomas had worked as a child model beside her mother and went on to do such fashion work on her own — the relationship between mother and daughter grew strained once Thomas came of age. In the late ‘80s, Thomas moved with a girlfriend to Portland, Oregon, for college, in order to avoid coming out as queer to Mama Bush.

What healed the relationship? Art, of course. Specifically, an art-school assignment concerning vulnerability, which sparked an idea for Thomas: What if she used her mother as her model for the project? After initial hesitation, the artist decided to go for it, and Mama Bush agreed to give it a try. Working together, the women dissolved their estrangement, got to know one another — not as parent and progeny, but as two adults — and forged a newly intimate closeness. After many rich portraits and paintings, this closeness culminated with Happy Birthday. But while Thomas made the film, her mother’s health was declining. “I regret not telling my mother that I was scared that she was dying,” Thomas told me, and when death drew near, “I imagined my own death. Now, I think about living. I think about self-care, my emotional and physical well-being. And mostly I think about my mother dying at 61 and how I will live healthier and longer.”

Delacroix once called art, specifically painting, “no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and that of the spectator.” For Thomas, it all comes down to this inter-mind connection — to “creating a narrative that others can relate to, that’s familiar to them… As people in the world, a lot of our stories are similar, right?  Our experiences may be vastly different, but they’re similar stories.”

At this point in our conversation, Thomas was telling me about her first great aesthetic epiphany. While she was studying in Oregon, a friend suggested that she catch a local museum exhibition of African-American photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series, in which family relations are pictured in ordinary yet telling and very touching interactions: a suggestion that had a life-changing result.   

Nowadays, of course, Thomas knows that artists of color and of queerness “do not need permission to be present” — in museums or anywhere. But back in her college days, hearing about the Weems show, Thomas “never felt that a museum was a place for me… I never felt that I belonged, or felt welcomed there… I didn’t know the power of what art can be until I started making it myself.” Suddenly confronted by Weems’s work, though, Thomas felt a shazam-like awakening: “Here I’m seeing something reflected that was so familiar but it wasn’t my family. It didn’t have to be my family. I understood the nuance. Everything within that composition, I could relate to. The mood of it, the gestures, the posing, the vulnerability, the anger… The little girl, the way her pigtails were — I recognized that… And the relationship between mother and child… How they’re being seen through each other’s eyes, and also through the male gaze, how the male was looking at them, with the sense of desire.”

Summing up the experience, Thomas explained, “It hit home...” She felt ready. “The gift that was given to me at that moment was: ‘Here’s your opportunity. How are you going to tell it?  What tools are you going to use?’ It gave me the agency, the insight, the readiness to tell my stories.”

Art school was the obvious next step for Thomas. “Over time, I began to see how to juxtapose various genres, and make sense of them.” And over time, too, she got to meet Weems, to tell the senior artist about Weems’s influence and from then their “paths” were “aligned and crossed.” Says Thomas now, “I’ve always looked at the power of her work in portraying the black body as a political landscape and claiming spaces of women’s agency as something to consider in my own work.” 

Logically enough, the locations where Thomas works affect her art. Seasons spent in natural settings as a child at summer camps and as a neophyte artist with residencies in Maine, Colorado, Vermont, Australia, and Giverny, France, have led her to create some landscape pieces. A few of these works reflect her interest in nineteenth-century Romantic painting and allow her to “go back to my earlier work, the abstractions.”

During the past several years, Thomas, her partner Racquel and their three young children have increasingly spent their kids-away-from-school time in what Thomas calls her “safe haven” — a house in Salisbury, Connecticut. Set in the northwestern corner of the state, next to the Berkshires and close to Yale Norfolk, Thomas calls this setting “the opposite of the Hamptons.” In Salisbury, she’s able to chill out and work in a productive balance, making most of her works on paper there. “I’m able to experiment, do research… to think. And, most importantly, be in nature.” 

Wherever she’s working, Thomas brings a refreshingly open attitude to the artistic process. Her mother once told her some wise words: “What you may see as a flaw is actually a great accent.” On hearing this, I couldn’t help but think that Thomas has taken to heart this forgiving, even welcoming view toward aesthetic imperfections.

For Thomas, making art is all about playing — try one thing, scratch it out, try something else and go on experimenting and pushing boundaries until the work reveals itself. How does she know when she pushed enough, when a particular piece is finished?  “When it scares you,” she says. When a certain edge — a transformation, a deepening has been reached. Still, what does “finished” even mean?  Perhaps all endings, other than death, are merely provisional for artists (and for tricksters). My guess, at any rate, is that Thomas’s work will go on transforming and deepening even as her life does. Artists like Thomas, artists so wonderfully “beyond category,” wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Mickalene Thomas is represented by lehmannmaupin.com

Gary Lippman, a lapsed lawyer, has published his work in The Paris Review, VICE and The New York Times. His new novel, ‘Set The Controls For The Heart of Sharon Tate’  ( Published by @rarebirdlit) is out now. Guzman are regular contributors to UD @lesguzman They are repped by Veronique Peres Domergue