In conjunction with the NAM exhibition Mickalene Thomas: Waiting on a Prime-Time Star, the artist will speak about her work in conversation with Dr. Mia Bagneris, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Tulane University.
A public reception celebrating the show’s opening will immediately follow in the Woodward Way breezeway.
Mickalene Thomas (b.1971) is a USA Fellow and acclaimed international artist known for her elaborately lush works that celebrate the power of female beauty toward claiming women’s agency. Thomas combines historical artworks and pop cultural representations that define and reference fashion and domestic spaces through a queer lens.
Mickalene Thomas is a 2015 United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow, a distinguished visual artist, filmmaker and curator who has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. She is known for paintings that combine art-historical, political, and pop-cultural references. Her work introduces complex notions of femininity and challenges common definitions of beauty and aesthetic representations of women.
Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000. Her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, originated at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2012 before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where her film “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman” premiered. Recent solo exhibitions include George Eastman House, New York; L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Monaco; and First International Contemporary Art Biennial, Columbia. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at La Conservera Contemporary Art Center, Ceutí, Spain; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Hara Museum, Tokyo; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Saatchi Gallery, London; and University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work has been featured in various catalogues and reviewed by Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NY Arts, Modern Painters, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Mickalene Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago and Berlin; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and serves on the board of the Brooklyn Museum, Children’s Museum of the Arts, MoCADA, MoMA PS1, and Rush Philanthropic.
supported in part by Newcomb Art Department and Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund for Recent Trends in Contemporary Art
photo: Francois Meyer, Mickalene Thomas, 2013
