Innovators of Survival with Mickalene Thomas
Words by Karen Leong | Photography by Brigitte Lacombe
Etched onto the autobiographical veil of Mickalene Thomas’ work is a reimagination of Black womanhood. It seeks no clearance from the male gaze. As a composite fusing of community and culture standing to attention, it wills the viewer to the magnitude and necessity of its presence.
As a contemporary African-American artist, Thomas plays an adversarial role across all genres of art – mixed media, sculpture, photography, collage and beyond – all the while tending to the margins of sex, gender and play.
Land formation and architecture are crucial beats in Thomas’ oeuvre – patterns and textural fractals are componential blocks of her art practice, a method of connection to her meta-physical apprehending of heritage. Sub-signifiers of hair braiding and patternmaking within her Pan-African lineage are also markers of community: the first piece of fabric threaded into an artwork was inherited from her grandmother, who had passed.
Quilt-making, a symbol of inheritance and repossession, became a motif of support in Thomas’ own historical praxis: “It was a gesture of mark-making from the ancestors. In those days, the Black body and the quilt gave you cause,” she explains. “I think about all those quiltmakers of the South… Sometimes that very object is all you can take with you. That’s all you have. Your own identity, stripped, forced out of tradition, thrown into something unknown.”
Dance is another poignant example. Thomas tells me the great American tradition of tap dancing, seemingly so whimsical, was born in the 1800s during the point at which African-American slavery and Irish immigration crossed paths. The dance style later become the ‘jigging’ performed by Black minstrel-show dancers of the 19th century.
“Having metal under your shoes and utilising it to tap slowly, to communicate, that’s creating out of nothing,” says Thomas. “We are innovators of survival.”
Mickalene Thomas La Maison de Monet, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Within the broader cultural narrative, the polyrhythmic dissembling of tap dancing is a testament to Black ingenuity under the heel of oppression. It should come to no surprise, then, that Thomas’ work is the most direct conduit for her voice. Telling one’s story as a means of constructing that space for others is work the artist recognises as vital.
Thomas clearly recognises the aberrations of the country she lives in. Black women, overlooked as the backbone and fabric of the American spirit have been quelled for centuries. Her body of work comes from a compulsion to enact change from the top up, weeding out the roots of disenfranchisement, which serve as shorthand for how the nation still treats women like herself to this day.
As Thomas will tell you, it’s an uphill slug to remain true to that legacy. How her work is articulated never stays with her after it is mounted for the public to see. She eschews expectations of the world to comprehend her work at face value – the space living in between the public and her art enables self-exploration and an inquiry of the self.
The mysteries of the world allow for investigation of the heart. The artist is uninterested in people who are wholeheartedly engrossed with her take on things, because, as she says, she only knows to work within her own life. Art therapy became an undulating process of introspection for her own ideas. All she knew was her own story, and the safety to create was born out of that.
As such, Thomas seeks to work with women in her life, either as a feature or via inspiration taken from her mother and aunties. Collaboration of this nature is a luxury, a source of comfort that is within reach and can be indulged. For the artist, the female body in its natural setting is a thing of lushness: oblique, shapely, imperfectly perfect. The subject and object often occupy indiscreet, identifiable categories.
In her collage work, the bodies of naked women are juxtaposed against the classic Western feminine, a remixing of baroque portraiture and the avant-garde editorials of the 1990s.
At the time of this interview, Thomas was getting ready to show a new body of work. The work, an archival selection of photographs depicting women in varying stages of undress, brought to the fore the soft tissue and residue of cellulite, running like train tracks across the naked form of the subjects.
Reweaving vintage erotica into her collaging, Thomas focuses on the natural prowess exuded by the women of this era – what you see is what you’re getting. Women with unchanged features are tenderly spotlit, giving them a moment of celebration without forfeiting the real. Even titans such as Oprah and US actor Taraji Penda Henson are staunch admirers of the critically acclaimed artist.
Thomas tells me about her child, who is mixed race. She is intent on changing the conversation for her daughter and the emergent generation as they come into recognition of themselves as arbiters of their own fate – as the poets, artists and creators of the future. This recognition is the result of the ongoing fight against the pre-existing matrices of this current world, raising the question: Can we anticipate that humanity in the arts and in the streets will flourish in this climate?
“What you do is unapologetically continue to tell your story,” Thomas insists. “Don’t make sacrifices or excuses, and continue to tell it until they see it and hear you. And I mean really see and hear you. Regardless of the barriers and the hurdles, persist.”