The Barnes Foundation will present Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, the first major international tour focused on the work of pioneering artist Mickalene Thomas, whose influences range from 19th-century painting to popular culture. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and Les Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse, All About Love is being shown as a series of independent presentations, with further venues to be confirmed. Curated for the Barnes by Renée Mussai, independent curator, scholar, and writer, this exhibition will be on view in the Roberts Gallery from October 20, 2024, through January 12, 2025.
All About Love, titled in homage to cultural critic, intellectual, and writer bell hooks, marks its East Coast debut at the Barnes with approximately 50 works made by Thomas over the past two decades. Showcasing a body of vivid and multifaceted artworks paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation, this exhibition celebrates her distinctive artistic practice.
Thomas’s work 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. Whether in imaginative dialogue with canonical works from the history of art or playfully reckoning with popular culture and erotica, Thomas’s exuberant portraitures offer an empowered vision of beauty and desire, formulated through a sensual, Black feminist lens.
“In her work, Mickalene Thomas often recasts scenes from 19th-century French paintings, like those well represented in the Barnes collection, in striking tableaux that champion Black figuration, sensuality, and power,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President. “We are delighted to present the East Coast debut of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, part of a major international touring project, and Thomas’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. We are honored to share her extraordinary and influential work with our community and beyond.”
“All About Love at the Barnes is an embodied visual love letter that moves through different temperatures, honoring the intimate and transformative qualities of Mickalene Thomas’s expansive practice,” says curator Renée Mussai. “Her artistic universe is forged from deep within the richly textured Black feminist ero-poetics of desire, where visual pleasures reside abundantly, and the powers of love of dedicated being, seeing, and looking are harnessed, amplified, beautified: exquisitely rendered, deliciously gendered.”
Featuring paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation from public and private collections, Mickalene Thomas: All About Loveis arranged in a series of thematic chapters that showcase the artist’s iterative practice, offer an in-depth look at select muses who appear throughout Thomas’s oeuvre, and highlight the artist’s continual dialogue with canonical works by Monet, Picasso, and Courbet, represented in the Barnes collection.
Exhibition highlights include:
• The celebrated Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires, 2010, a monumental work measuring 10 feet by 24 feet (120 × 288 in. / 304.8 × 731.5 cm)
• Me as Muse, 2016, a site-specific moving-image installation featuring 12 video monitors
• Excerpts from an expansive body of collage works made between 2021 and 2023, from the Jet Blue and Nus Exotiques series.
• The seminal Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015, as featured on the cover of the accompanying catalogue.
• A recent larger-than-life iteration of Tête de Femme completed in 2022, with rhinestones, glitter, Swarovski crystals, fabric, oil pastel, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas.
• Early painted works from the Brawlin’ Spitfire wrestling series.
Concurrent with the exhibition, the Barnes will also present four monumental photo collage panels by Thomas, titled Noir est beau (Joséphine Baker 3), on the east end of the Annenberg Court. Originally created for Dior’s 2023 couture runway show, the embroidered panels feature archival images of pioneering Black performer and activist Josephine Baker, who served as muse to Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri for the 2023 show. The four panels that will be on view during All About Love are among 13 tapestries that were created for the runway’s scenography, all featuring women who inspire Thomas and who, she states, “with the odds set against them, persevered with confidence, elegance, beauty, and talent.”
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) is one of the most influential artists today; her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. Thomas completed her MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, and soon after 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. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Award–nominated co-producer, curator, educator, and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. She lives and works in New York. More information.
