Article - January 14, 2026

Ten questions with artist Mickalene Thomas before visiting the exhibition "All About Love"

Entering the world of Mickalene Thomas means discovering a universe where love, beauty, and the power of Black women shine brilliantly. Over more than twenty years of creation, the American artist has reinvented the canon of art history, blending painting, photography, collage, and immersive installations. Ten questions with the artist to explore her work, a celebration of joy and resilience, before visiting the exhibition All About Love at the Grand Palais, open until April 5.

Love plays a central role in your work, both as a creative driving force and as a form of resistance. Why did you choose to draw on bell hooks’s All About Love, and how did that book shape the conception of the exhibition?

I’m often inspired by intergenerational female empowerment, autobiographies, memories, and Black feminist theories and writings. bell hooks, in particular, has had a profound impact on me. “All About Love” so yes, this touring exhibition is inspired by her 2000 essay collection. My exhibition explores how my work draws on relationships centered around family, love, self-expression, vulnerability, and joy, which are topics that bell hooks explores in these essays. Similar to bell hooks, I believe we should all find the strength to explore who we are and to fully embrace it. Once we can do this, we have reached a certain level of freedom and inhibition that can help us transform our self and others.

Visuel d'oeuvre de Mickalene Thomas — Mickalene Thomas, A Moment’s Pleasure #2, 2008

Your work celebrates the beauty and power of Black women. To what extent do you see it as an act of repair or reclamation?

As an artist, I have the ability to radically disrupt and shift narratives for present and future generations. I use my work, which is about Black women claiming space, to depict their beauty, femininity, desire and power as a way to liberate cultural oppression and marginalisation. I want to make Black identity, femininity and queerness more visible and I believe it’s possible to achieve this through my practice as both an act of repair and reclamation.

How do you choose the women you portray? What kind of personal or emotional connection do you have with them?

My mother, Sandara Bush, was one of my first muses. I wanted to portray her exactly how I saw her: a worthy and powerful Black woman. My goal was for others to see the beauty and strength she – and all Black women – possess. Today, my subjects range from friends, family, lovers, and cultural figures that I admire. With each subject, I explore pleasure, love, and joy and create narratives idealised based on memories of desire. I hope to convey that the inner beauty, allure, and sexuality of my subjects are not imposed from the outside— they are inherent to each person and should be celebrated on their own terms. I want to continue exploring make work that look like Black women.

Trois femmes noires déjeunent sur l'herbe — Mickalene Thomas, *Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Three Black Women*, 2010

You revisit masterpieces by Matisse and Manet. What draws you to these dialogues with the Western art canon?

I playfully revisit paintings by many artists, what is mostly referenced are these artists, Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, who both recall and frame the dominant Western art canon. I insert black women into positions originally occupied by white figures as a provocative way to start new narratives about identity, representation, and to claim the Black female gaze. For example, in my piece Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: les trois femmes noires, which was my largest work at the time and commissioned by the MoMa for the Modern restaurant I recreated Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as a way to challenge the original notions of beauty and identity. In my version, three confident Black women are depicted in the center with a fixed resilient gaze at the viewer. It literally and figuratively took up space.

You work across painting, collage, photography, video, and installation. In your collages, you gather images, sometimes from archives. What is it about these fragments that draws you in? When you assemble them, are you trying to document the world, or offer a fresh reinterpretation of it?

I use a variety of techniques as a way of dismantling the western notions of beauty. The tools I harbor help me to create my artworks that authentically speak my creative language. My signature technique is layered and complex, even if I am using my own photographic resources or archival images, I’m exploring the nuance of the materials resource to reimagine the image. By using techniques of silkscreen and collage which allow for the disruptive and playful integration of painting and photography and the addition of rhinestones create a sense of pleasure, seduction and light. Collage is an intricate means of discovery and exploration for all my ideas and a way of learning and unlearning systems. It helps me anchor and make sense of my composition and the narrative around the work. With this technique, I can edit back and rebuild layers throughout the process to reach my core idea.

Vinyl, rhinestones, fabrics and paint play a prominent role in your works. What symbolism do you attribute to these various materials, particularly the many reflective surfaces, mirrors, and rhinestones? Are they a way to engage the viewer, to make them ‘reflect’, in a literal and figurative sense?

I find the materials to be provocative and bold with my use of rich, vibrant color. The materials set the tone for the psychological play, rhythm and magic communicated. My work is exuberant with signifier’s that carry important messages, coded within the new storylines, celebrating Black women that claim space and embrace their beauty, femininity, and power. Through my many materials, I capture the strength, vulnerability, and sensuality of my subjects. The reflective and colorful touches bring more attention to the beauty, essence, and elegance of the Black bodies I’m portraying. By juxtaposing different elements in my work, I spark new dialogues and challenge traditional representations of women and liberate cultural oppression and marginalization in memorable ways.

How did you conceive the layout of this retrospective? Were you aiming for a chronological narrative, or more of a sensory experience for the visitor?

The exhibition brings together works spanning the last 20 years of my career. It’s not only a milestone for me as my first major international show, it’s also deeply personal. The show is arranged in thematic chapters using temperature, time, sound, color, scale and pace as a means of authoritative ownership to choreograph the audience experience in an immersive way. It is definitely not in a chronological narrative. There are moments where later works are in dialogue with earlier pieces to showcase how I revisit, revise, and deepen subjects across time.

The paintings, collage, photography, performative videos and site-specific installation from public and private collections are arranged to showcase the my iterative practice, offer an in-depth look at select muses who appear throughout my oeuvre, and highlight my continual dialogue with canonical works by Bearden, Warhol, Ringgold, Monet, Picasso, and Courbet, to name a few. It is not a retrospective, but a portal into my world where love reigns above all. We would need a bigger space to really provide a fully comprehensive showcase of my work.

Your work is often compared to Pop Art. How do you feel about that comparison? How does the approach of artists from that movement relate to your own practice?

My bold use of color, patterns, and luminosity are connected to Pop Art which is cultivated by Black culture, but what’s unusual for most Pop Art in my work is that Black women are the central figures. I expand upon Pop Culture to create new narratives and initiate an in depth narrative on historical art narrative where Black women have been omitted. Out of the Pop Artists Wesselmann’s and Warhol, work in particular has resonated with me. For Wasslemann’s I was initially drawn to his great American nudes and his bold, flat colors. These elements related to the ways I was experimenting with fragmentation and the body at the time. For Warhol it’s his portraits of Icon /Famous Faces, which lends inspiration to my silkscreen methods and practice.

If your work could be translated into sound, what kind of music or rhythm would it have?

If my work were sound, it would be layered and unapologetic. It would move like jazz and funk braided with hip-hop, improvisational, rhythmic, and deeply rooted in Black cultural memory. There’d be a steady bassline holding everything together, like resilience, while sharp accents hit unexpectedly like rhinestones catching the light. The rhythm would be sensual but defiant, slow grooves that invite you in, then sudden syncopation that reminds you you’re being challenged, not comforted. Background music that follows you in your dreams demanding presence, confidence and self-resilience.

If this exhibition were to leave a single phrase or feeling in the visitor’s mind, what would it be?

Love as a quiet shift, the sense that something small but fundamental has changed in how you see the world.

A few words on Mickalene Thomas's artistic journey

Mickalene Thomas has built a body of work focused on the visibility and power of Black women, challenging the conventions of art history. Through painting, photography, and installation, she uses bold materials and artistic references to assert the pleasure, autonomy, and identity of her subjects, always placing them at the center of representation. A major turning point in her career came in 1994 in Portland, Oregon, when she discovered Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series at the Portland Art Museum. For Thomas, it was the first time she saw the work of a Black artist who seemed to “see” her, her roots and her story. This encounter with an intimate and assertive narrative opened the way for her: she realized that her own perspective as a Black woman is legitimate and essential in artistic creation. This experience marks the beginning of her creative approach, in which representing Black people becomes a conscious act of storytelling and cultural affirmation, rather than mere observation.