“Mickalene Thomas: Experimentation and the Aughts.” Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, exhibition catalogue, The Broad, Los Angeles (2024)

Excerpt from: Mickalene Thomas: Experimentation and the Aughts, in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, exhibition catalogue, edited by Ed Schad, The Broad, Los Angeles & Hayward Gallery, London, 2024:

"Throughout Western art history, portraiture has mostly commonly been thought of as a static, typically vertical likeness of a sitter's face that frames the head and shoulders. Mickalene Thomas's portraits celebrating Black female sexuality and subjectivity have problematized the genre for over two decades. This essay focuses on the foundational years of Thomas’s residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2022–2023, just after she received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022, and Frequency (2005), the second in the Studio Museum exhibition series featuring works by emerging Black artists, which—like its precursor Freestyle (2001)—I organized. Liberated from the confines of pedagogy at Yale, which concentrated on canonical European art history, Thomas created and expanded formal and contextual languages and entanglements to address queries that had arisen in the years prior..."

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“Mickalene Thomas: Experimentation and the Aughts.” Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, exhibition catalogue, ed. Ed Schad, The Broad, Los Angeles and Hayward Gallery, London (2024)