MICKALENE THOMAS: ALL ABOUT LOVE
The Broad
Los Angeles
Through Sept. 29, 2024
Little did I know that my stay in Los Angeles would begin with my walking through the front door of a facsimile New Jersey rowhome. Until September 29, the glass doors of the Broad open onto the vinyl-paneled facade of 604 Mt. Vernon Street in Camden, the city where the artist Mickalene Thomas was born in 1971. All About Love, the first touring exhibition of her work, opened last week in L.A. before embarking on a tour to Philadelphia, London, and Toulouse, France.
Arriving at the Broad for an early morning press event, I was ushered along with several dozen others into the empty atrium of the museum, which — despite its aggressively modern concrete curves and glass — felt more like the deserted street in front of someone’s house than a multibillion-dollar tax haven for wealthy philanthropists. Score one for Thomas: it’s tough to make a museum feel like a welcoming place, but the warm glow of lamplight behind curtains and the colorful welcome mat on the neighbor’s stoop transported me, at least, back east.
The first room of the show is equally revealing, as it contains two more rooms, odes to the loving, shag-carpeted spaces where the artist’s late mother, Sandra Bush, raised her. On the walls of the wood-paneled living room are three photographs of “Mama” Bush that Thomas took in 2003, alongside a brightly colored mixed-media self-portrait in glitter and lime-green paint. Thomas said that the golden Crocs at the edge of the installation were the last shoes her mother ever wore, now preserved forever like a child’s first shoes; the neighboring wall of the gallery contained bronze casts of Bush’s favorite outfit.
All About Love spans Thomas’s career, which began with representations of herself and her mother but soon opened out into beautiful, large-scale portraits of other Black women. Her collages can be measured in yards; her studio must stock rhinestones by the thousands. But the scale of each portrait is inverse to the intimacy these images create; you can tell just by looking at the way her muses peer out from the frame that they’re co-conspirators in the work. It’s dazzling, and not just because of all the glitter.
I felt like Thomas had invited me directly into the living room she’d grown up in, and rather than asking me to leave after the first room, she kept encouraging me to pause and reorient myself. Few artists will invite you into the living room of their youth; even fewer will devote as much thought as Thomas did to the way viewers will physically feel in the galleries. This might seem like a minor note, but I’ve never had a wider array of comfortable places to sit, whether it was the beanbag chairs that fill the room containing her playful Wrestlers series — in which two figures in wildcat leotards, both played by Thomas, tussle — or the colorful patchwork chairs from her mother’s living room, which were arrayed in the show’s largest room like a dozen favorite armchairs, each with its own side table stacked with books by Black writers (including bell hooks, whose 2000 book All About Love gives this show its name). That’s just one way that Thomas brings the radical practice of her studio into the gallery. Her work is all about creating space, not only for the models and muses of her paintings but also for the Black women who have been excluded from the Western art world, whether as painters or painted.
To that end, Thomas is a canny manipulator both of her chosen media — painting, collage, sculpture, video — and of museum resources. While the president of the museum might have opened her remarks with a rote land acknowledgment, Thomas talked about spending Dior Foundation money to bring a step troupe of young girls from New Jersey, who have never been on a plane before, to perform at the evening opening of her show. Thomas wants to change the way that Black people, especially queer Black women, see themselves, not only in art but in the art world as well — and that work begins even before she dips her paintbrush.
