Overview

 

As art critic Kimberly Lamm once wrote, the word ‘dazzling' would not suffice to describe Mickalene Thomas’ shimmering portraits of women. Working across a variety of media — photography, collage, painting, video —Thomas builds from existing imagery to compose her mesmerising paintings, infusing their subject matter with individuated power, historical importance, and resounding referentiality of former contributions to the genre of portraiture. As expressed by Olivia Parkes, Thomas ‘strikes a careful balance between celebrating beauty as something sensual and addressing it as a set of ideals that can be harmful to those who don't conform to them. It's this ability to contain contradictions—to wrestle stereotypes, history, and the demands of the culture industry into loud but harmonious images—that makes her one of the most important artists working today’.¹ Importantly, Thomas re-imagines Black female subjectivity and envisions her subjects through a liberated lens — ‘a gesture that dares to assert a more inclusive understanding of what—and whom—blackness may represent’.²

'I love everything about women and more – confident women, smart women, the I-don’t-give-a-sh*t women, with all shades of Blackness.' —Mickalene ThomasEncrusted with rhinestones and beaming with glitter, Clarivel Right is undeniably dazzling; and yet, there is something more urgent that emanates from its layered rendition. The woman at its centre — the eponymous Clarivel — looks outwards, solemn and bold, as if attending a hearing or posing, knowingly, for a work of which the importance does not elude her. She is at once there and not, establishing all the power of her existence whilst denying our gaze as the sole validation of it. In fact, Clarivel is a recurring subject matter within Thomas’ oeuvre. The very photograph she used as a foundation to create the work appears multiple times throughout her painterly repertoire and alters to various degrees. While Clarivel with Orange Earring, executed a year after the present work, presents a mainly photographic rendition of the woman, for instance, the present portrait is more abstract, more layered, weaving a variety of materials in its midst to ornate the otherwise all-too traditional medium of acrylic and oil painting. Notably, the first work by Thomas to enter the Davis Museum’s collection is also a portrait of Clarivel.

 

 

Photographing, Stitching, Painting

 

Upon looking at Clarivel Right, one is struck by the meticulous construction of both character and compositional pattern. Thomas’ artmaking process is equally minute. After photographing her subjects, the artist cuts elements, adds and removes motifs, pastes disparate images to make the collages that will later serve as studies for her paintings. Notably, her method of layering constructed images and shiny accessories reflects her vision of the photographed and painted protagonists; ‘A lot of the layering of material and patterning is about their own journeys, their own perseverance, their own struggles’, she explained. ‘The residue, the unearthing of time and space, is about their scars, and mostly it’s about the artifice of what you may think you see and the reality of it being another truth.’³ With Clarivel Right, one can infer the character associations Thomas envisioned upon considering her sitter — glamour, power, elegance, sensuality. Clarivel is unapologetically assertive; her patched-up appearance, sober in areas and resolutely scintillating in others, conveys the richness of her interior persona.

 

The Female Muse

 

At the outset of her photographic and painterly career, Thomas would use images of herself as a visual starting point to compose her collaged works. She had begun developing this practice at the Pratt Institute, where she obtained her BFA, and later at Yale University, where she graduated with an MFA in painting. Soon, she began to expand upon the theme she had first engaged with through images of her own likeness, delving instead into a wider realm of femininity, looking at women she knew, or Jet Magazine’s ‘Beauty of the Week’. ‘When I began to work with other women’, she said, ‘who were mostly my friends, family members, and lovers, using my tableaux as backdrops for their portraits, I wanted them to engage with the space, just as an actress would entering a theatrical stage’.⁴ Explaining that her practice is in fact a love letter to womanhood, Thomas further mused, ‘I love everything about women and more – confident women, smart women, the I-don’t-give-a-sh*t women, with all shades of Blackness. When I think of all the women in my life, I think of those who have mentored me, about those I’ve read about in books and their stories. I think about all the women who have trail-blazed and sojourned that I aspire to be, about all the women who I haven’t met yet and who protect me’.⁵

 

Meet the Artist

 

 

¹ Olivia Parkes, ‘Artist Mickalene Thomas Is Bringing Black Women into the Canon’, Vice, 5 August 2016, online.

² Derek Conrad Murray, ‘Mickalene Thomas: Afro-Kitsch and the Queering of Blackness’, The University of Chicago Press Journal, reproduced online.
³ Mickalene Thomas, quoted in ‘Frieze NY Special: In the studio with Mickalene Thomas’, Lux-Mag, Summer 2020, online.
⁴ Mickalene Thomas, quoted in Olivia Parkes, ‘Artist Mickalene Thomas Is Bringing Black Women into the Canon’, Vice, 5 August 2016, online.
⁵ Mickalene Thomas, quoted in ‘Frieze NY Special: In the studio with Mickalene Thomas’, Lux-Mag, Summer 2020, online.