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Recommended reading: the foundational text of Mickalene Thomas’s exhibition All About Love
Mickalene Thomas's exhibition All About Love celebrates the intimacy, sensuality and power of Black women. It owes its title to bell hooks' book,All About Love: New Visions (1999), which presents love as a force for transformation and empowerment.
Mickalene Thomas, Untitled #10, 2014
The title of the exhibition was chosen as a direct reference to bell hooks' book. Present in some of reconstructed settings, the book becomes a tangible element of the installation. It inscribes Mickalene Thomas's thinking in an assumed intellectual filiation, between black feminist thought and aesthetic affirmation.
Published in 1999, bell hooks's essay proposes understanding love not as a passive emotion, but as a conscious act: care, respect, honest communicationn, and a commitment to personal and social transformation. For bell hooks, loving is not something that "just happens", but something we actively practice, in our relationships and within our communities. She also emphasizes how true love, built with care and commitment, stays with us wherever we go.
This philosophy permeates Mickalene Thomas's exhibition currently at the Grand Palais. Through portraits, installations and domestic settings, the artist explores love, joy and self-affirmation, placing Black women at the center of her visual universe. Recreated interiors, textures, soft lighting and immersive music make the exhibition a space where love becomes a sensory experience and a celebration of feminine power.
Her work also engages in a reinterpretation of art history and classical portraiture, transformed through a queer aesthetic that centers Black women. Painting, photography, collage and installation dialogue to challenge traditional notions of beauty, sexuality and femininity, while celebrating their diversity and plurality. At the heart of this work: love as a driving force for emancipation and affirmation.
Reading bell hooks sheds light on the philosophical stakes that run through Mickalene Thomas's work, offering a reflection to deepen before or after your visit. The book is also available at the Salon Seine shop, in French, subject to availability.
