Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

by Mickalene Thomas (Artist), Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Text by), Darnell L. Moore (Text by), Claudia Rankine (Text by), Ed Schad (Text by)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Fitting all of Mickalene Thomas into one book is no easy feat, but this vibrant collection of her life and work is as insightful as it is a joy to look at.

A major monograph chronicling Thomas' vibrant, rhinestone-adorned paintings

Contemporary African-American artist Mickalene Thomas has created a dramatic body of work that ranges from painting, collage and print to photography, video and immersive installations. The book -- and the exhibition at the Broad Museum on which it is based -- shares its title 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.
Through her probing investigations of pop culture and mass media, Thomas makes a reverberating demand for Black women to be seen and understood, and for viewers to become what hooks calls "practitioners of love."
With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas' art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while upending traditional definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity and politics. This major publication further affirms Thomas' status as a key, influential figure in contemporary art. It features notable works that are arranged in thematic chapters throughout the book.
The book also features an interview with the artist by Rachel Thomas, and is followed by essays from Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Renée Mussai and Christine Y. Kim, which cover her distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and tenets of Black feminist theory. Together, these essays explore how Thomas subverts art history to reclaim the notions of repose, rest and leisure in works that celebrate self-expression and joy. For the artist, repose is a radical act, pointing to "what is able to happen once you have the agency."
Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) is an international, award-winning, multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636812991
Publisher:	D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	9.70(w) x 12.00(h) x 1.30(d)

Editorial Reviews

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.

The Gay & Lesbian Review - Reginald Harris

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.

Juxtapoz - Ed Schad

Thomas, for her own part, seems driven to complicate and enrich what love, admiration, and reflection can offer, refusing the funhouse mirror through which US culture so often depicts her chosen subject of Black women, and pointing instead to what [Audre] Lorde might describe as 'those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.'

Hyperallergic - Lakshmi Rivera Amin

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.

Observer - Dan Duray

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 New York Review of Books - Carolina A. Miranda

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

Them - Wren Sanders

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

CBS : Sunday Morning - Tracy Smith

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.

New York Magazine: The Cut - Maggie Lange

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.'

W Magazine - Tara Dalbow

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.

Cultured - Essence Harden

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.

Artforum - Eve Hill-Agnus

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

The New Statesman - Michael Prodger

A constant source of surprise and delight.

Galerie - Geoff Montes

The exhibition is a true spectacle, bringing together film, installation, large-scale paintings, and collages.

AnOther Magazine - Alayo Akinkugbe

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.

AnOther Magazine - Martha Alexander

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.

Dazed - Lydia Figes

After lauded outings in LA and Philadelphia, Mickalene Thomas arrives at the Hayward Gallery with a roar. It’s the roar of a wrestler’s body-slam or a diva’s ovation – throaty, triumphant, immoderate. Thomas’s exhibition is all that, and glamorous too, opening with a room of monumental portraits of black women.

The Guardian - Hettie Judah

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.

The Philadelphia Sun - Teresa Emerson

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.

Alta - Shaquille Heath

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

New York Magazine: Vulture - Jerry Saltz

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.

Rolling Stone - Larisha Paul

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.

Hyperallergic - Alexis Clements

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.

NPR: Fresh Air - Tonya Mosley

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.

Chadd Scott: Media

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.

British Journal of Photography - Elisa Medde

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.

Wallpaper* - Hannah Silver

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

Art Plugged

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.

The Los Angeles Times - Christopher Knight

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

Essence - Okla Jones

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.

Huck magazine - Sara Rosen