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Photo by Lyndsy Welgos, Topical Cream
Mickalene Thomas.
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Photo by Dusty Kessler
Installation shot, ""Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities" at CAM.
Friday evening at the Saint Louis Art Museum, artist Mickalene Thomas discussed her art with Lisa Melandri, the executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Simon Kelly, SLAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
The trio talked about her process, her intentions, her famous rhinestones, and still-closed doors for black women.
At CAM through the end of 2017, Mickalene Thomas: Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities examines black womanhood through a video entitled Do I Look Like a Lady?, manipulations of images from the film The Color Purple, and lounges where visitors can interact with each other and the work. And currently on display at SLAM is 2012’s large-scale chromogenic print Din, Une Trés Belle Négresse 1.
The Din image, like so many of Thomas’ paintings and photographs, features a black woman, beautifully made-up, gazing frankly at the viewer in a way that engages both as object and subject—she’s seeing us just as much as we’re seeing her.
“For me the gaze is about claiming a space and the recognition that the women that I’m working with are owning their own prowess,” said Thomas. “They’re claiming the spaces and forcing the viewer to see them.”
Thomas didn’t come to photography until relatively recently, with much of her early work in acrylic painting and collage.
“I wanted to use photography as a tool to capture the images of my sitters, my models, in a really frontal, real way where the viewer could really contend with and be with the person,” Thomas said. “The photograph is so much better because it allows you to understand that these are real women, these are everyday women, these are women that you see walking down the street, in all their beauty and their essence.”
Working with the slow process of a large format camera requires deliberation and patience, Thomas says.
“It’s almost like building up a painting and I wanted that essence in the work,” she says. “I wanted the end product to feel as if it was a painting image.”
The construction of her works is imbued with meaning always, full of signifiers and references. Din’s Afro wig, Thomas explained, is social and political commentary as well as a way for the model to claim her own beauty.
“My work is this silent political voice, and I put all of my political references in my work,” Thomas said.
Thomas has made heavy use of collage, and many of her paintings are embellished with rhinestones in a way that recalls the Pointillism of Seurat as well as Aboriginal dot painting. Both represent art historical reference, but also Thomas’ fiscal realities in her early years.
“As a young artist, I couldn’t really afford oil paint,” she said. “I was one of those students at Pratt that would go into the Dumpster and dig out old stretchers that other students would throw away, and make use of the materials. Michaels craft store was one of my favorite spots.” Collage also allowed her to avoid shelling out for oil paint.
The configuration of the installation at CAM, she says, is meant as much to evoke the feeling and the nostalgia of being in her childhood home as it is to encourage viewers to engage with the video in a way that people often don’t. People breeze by after a few seconds or minutes rather than consuming the entire piece, she says.
“I always wanted the viewer to sit in front of my work in video in the same way that they would a Rothko,” she says. “When you put a bench in front of something, you’re asking the viewer to take that time and space to be with whatever image is in front of them.”
During the audience Q&A, a visitor asked Thomas about a large-scale painting that The Museum of Modern Art had commissioned from her. The work, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, was a direct reference to the 1863 Manet painting of the same name. It hung in MoMA’s P.S. 1 First Floor Lobby for three years.
Had MoMA ultimately purchased the piece?
“The answer is sad, because no they did not,” said Thomas. For women, and particularly African American women, she said, “the doors to that are still very closed. Although they may feel that these works are very powerful, there’s just not room in their collection for them.”
Mickalene Thomas: Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities is on view through December 31. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is located in Grand Center, at 3750 Washington. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday and Friday. Admission is free. For more information on this and other fall exhibits, go to camstl.org.
