“Ms. Thomas’s portraits, reclining odalisques and figure groups...cover many bases: aesthetic, political, art-historical and pop-cultural. Their sheer complexity makes them seem close to self-sufficient, secure in their ability to reach most viewers on one wavelength or another. They set the eye and brain whirring, parsing subversive meanings and quotations, skipping among mediums and savoring the contrasting surface textures, which include slatherings and smooth, enamel-like finishes and thin, brushy strokes.Above all, these works convey a pride of person that gives any viewer—not only women—an occasion to rise to.”
W ith her bold stare and art historically iconographic pose of the reclining female, the model in Mickalene Thomas’s I Just Want To Be With You is unapologetic. Known for challenging conventional notions of femininity, sexuality, and blackness in art history, Thomas’s portraits of women in bold-patterned interiors of the 1970s evoke nostalgia hand in hand with innovation. Though in the canonical pose, the artist presents this woman fully clothed, ultimately undermining the centuries-long tradition of the objectification of the female body. In I Just Want To Be With You, seduction steps aside for embodied agency and empowerment of the female model. As the artist has said, “By portraying real women with their own unique history, beauty and background, I’m working to diversify the representations of black women in art.”
Thomas presents her intimate knowledge and understanding of art history through her luxurious compositions, making reference to master painters such as Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Gustave Courbet. Through her own paintings, Thomas redefines the narrative and places the black female model unapologetically at the center; she references art history while subverting and redefining it. A modern take on Manet’s Olympia from 1863, Thomas undermines the male gaze that is embedded in canonical art history; she displays her model with the same bold gaze as the original subject, yet she is clothed, and she is alone. The striking patterns, glitter, and beading that Thomas uses in her oeuvre, too, introduce another degree of accessibility—in the words of Ian Alteveer, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Mickalene’s work may be steeped in the history of painting and portraiture, yet there is an accessibility to everything she does—the colors, the compositions, the glitter.”
Thomas first gained recognition with her portrait of Michelle Obama in 2008, the first of solo portrait of the former first lady, and now in the permanent collects ion of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her acclaim continued to rise at Art Basel in 2013, when her immersive environment, Better Days, transported fair-goers to the 1970s; the installation became the talk of the fair, even including celebrity performances. In 2019, her portrait of Naomi Campbell, Naomi Looking Forward, sold at Replica Shoes ’s London for $700,000, more than double its high estimate. Heralded as a leading contemporary artist of our t.mes , works by Thomas are held in the permanent collects ions of esteemed museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Art Institute of Chicago.
