It Hurts So Good: Ed Schad on 5 Works by Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas b. 1971, United States Follow +

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love (25 May–29 September 2024) references the book of the same title by bell hooks, which considers love as an active process geared towards collective liberation.

It is the first major international survey of the New Jersey-born artist and spans 20 years of her career with over 80 works, ranging from rhinestone-encrusted paintings and collages to exuberant installations, videos, and photographs. Following its inauguration at The Broad, the show will travel to Philadelphia and later to London.

Invited by Ocula Magazine, The Broad curator Ed Schad shares five works in All About Love, from a bedazzled self-portrait from Thomas' early wrestling series to recent paintings made in parallel with Black Lives Matter.

1. It Hurts So Good! [Brawlin' Spitfire Two] (2007)

One of the spaces that we are most excited about in this exhibition is dedicated to Thomas' wrestler paintings from 2006 and 2007. She debuted these works at Vielmetter Los Angeles, where they were shown in a paneled and carpeted room designed to evoke 1970s interiors. We have built a similar space at The Broad, gathering some of the best examples of the wrestlers.

Thomas created wrestlers to explore multiple sides of her personality. All of the women depicted in these paintings are Thomas herself, and in works that feature a pair of people, only her own face is shown. The artist considers these a form of self-portraiture—allegories of the friction between body and mind, each a physical manifestation of inner conflicts.

A subtitle found in the series, Brawlin' Spitfire, comes from the cover of a wrestling magazine. Many references to the sport are embraced in the works, from homemade erotica nicknamed 'apartment wrestling' to classical sculpture with wrestling as its subject. Some of the poses in the series were inspired by photography in Theo Ehret's book, Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling (2001), which was also influenced by traditional wrestling moves.

2. Portrait of Maya #10 (2017)

Maya, a friend and muse of Thomas, is seen multiple times in this exhibition: in the photograph (If Loving You is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right (2006), the painting A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007), and Portrait of Maya #10, which is the first work by Thomas to come into The Broad's collection. Together, the three works demonstrate Thomas' sustained attention to her muses and her continual reuse of their imagery across different mediums and materials.

The trope of the reclining nude figure, seen in such works as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's La Grande Odalisque (1814), has long exoticised women and odalisques. Thomas' 2006 photograph and 2007 painting work beyond this tradition, moving the pose out of male fantasies and into a space of mutual trust between women. Portrait of Maya #10 references two works by Francisco Goya: La maja desnuda (1795–1800) and La maja vestida (1800–1805). She uses a double-exposure technique to show Maya in various states of undress, positioned powerfully upright and overlooking the viewer—upending the submissive and available presentations of Goya's subjects.

3. Me as Muse (2016)

At The Broad, Thomas' amazing multimedia work is presented across a stack of 12 televisions against a garden wallpaper backdrop. The video collages changing views of Thomas in the nude with both recognisable and lesser-known images from art history and culture, among them an odalisque by Amedeo Modigliani and an image of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi southern African woman who was exploited and exoticized by colonial powers in England and Europe in the 19th century.

Me as Muse looks to the position of Black models in history, whether their frequent exoticization or their absence. Thomas juxtaposes her own body with historic representations of women by male artists, offering herself as a centre for critique and reflection. The soundtrack is a 1989 interview with Eartha Kitt from the Terry Wogan Show, in which the singer speaks candidly about the abuse, suffering, and racism she experienced in her life.

In All About Love, this work is paired with two paintings, Landscape with woman washing her feet (2008) and Monet's Salle a Manger Jaune (2012), to powerful effect. Thomas' work is often about the political act of dwelling, of finding joy when it is threatened. The dynamic between these works reflects her ethic of allowing herself and others the freedom to occupy spaces unapologetically and beautifully; I think this will prove to be my favourite part of the exhibition.

4. The Charnel House (Resist #5) (2021)

Thomas made her first Resist painting in 2017 for the Seattle Art Museum's Figuring History exhibition, which focused on questioning distorted narratives of history through Black experience. She brought her extensive toolkit of collage, rhinestones, and other craft materials, along with her viewpoint as a queer woman to create a direct encounter with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Thomas was especially inspired by the work of Robert Colescott, whose satirical paintings offered her a sense of permission and a voice to approach historical events proactively.

In this painting, the history of civil rights in the U.S. meets the open conflicts and struggles of the present. The surface is an accumulation of slogans: signs for the Black Panther Party's 'Free Breakfast for School Children Program' join the names of Freddie Gray and Alton Sterling (both killed in encounters with police), as well as posters for Black Lives Matter and the 2017 March for Racial Justice held in Washington D.C. ('Women of Color Have Always Led Change').

The collision of eras in this work is buttressed and sharpened by deep questions about art's ability and responsibility to be an agent for political protest and change. Thomas interlaces the panel with patterns invoking Pablo Picasso's The Charnel House (1944–45), an unfinished painting depicting a massacre and that, along with Guernica (1937), is seen as the artist's most direct engagement with the politics and horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and to some commentators, World War II and the Holocaust.

5. February 1976 (2021)

From its inception in 1951, Jet magazine was a key mouthpiece for the civil rights movement, while also celebrating and profiling Black life, beauty, and fashion. Thomas' mother was a collector of Jet magazines and Thomas has remarked that her early work often channeled Jet's 'Beauty of the Week' feature that showcased a different woman in each issue. In 2017, Thomas began to use Jet as a source material in her work, specifically Jet's nude calendar, where, unlike 'Beauty of the Week', the models were anonymous. Of central importance to the Jet works is that Thomas extends the same attention, care, and love to the unnamed women in the calendar images as to her muses.

The original Jet calendar image for February 1976 featured a model in an interior populated with plants, one of which serves to obscure her genitals. A decorative screen acts as a backdrop and the model is posed like an odalisque right out of art history. In the mixed-media painting, Thomas intervenes dramatically in the scene, leaving the model mostly intact and expressive while radically abstracting the plants and screen. For the work's debut at Lévy Gorvy gallery in 2021, the artist evoked the grid of the screen and the plants in the space itself, filling the floor with mirrored tiles and greenery—an installation we have recreated at The Broad. —[O]

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on view at The Broad in Los Angeles from 25 May to 29 September 2024. It travels to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from 20 October 2024 to 12 January 2025, and to Hayward Gallery in London from 10 February to 5 May 2025.

Main image: Ed Schad and Mickalene Thomas. Courtesy The Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Marc Patrick/BFA.com.