Mickalene Thomas

All About Love

All About Love is a monographic exhibition by the American artist Mickalene Thomas (1971, New York), recognized worldwide for her bold and multidimensional practice. Through painting, collage, photography, video and installation, Thomas reimagines classical portraiture from a uniquely queer and Black feminist perspective, exploring the visibility and representation of Black women in art, history, and popular culture.

At the heart of her work is love, presented as a force of liberation, self-assertion, and joy. Inspired by bell hooks's seminal book, All About Love: New Visions (1999), the exhibition celebrates love’s power to transform both personal and collective life.

Featuring works spanning over two decades, All About Love honors the agency, beauty, and resilience of Black women. Thomas’s subjects - friends, family, lovers, and cultural icons - are depicted with confidence, sensuality, and grace, reclaiming spaces historically denied to them. Her lush, rhinestone-studded compositions invite viewers into worlds where pleasure becomes a political act and representation takes on a radical form.

Thomas’s practice often reinterprets and disrupts canonical moments in European, particularly French, art history. Works referencing masterpieces such as Manet with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Ingres with La Grande Odalisque (1814) are reimagined through a contemporary lens of empowerment, placing Black women firmly at the center of the narrative.

All About Love invites audiences to enter a universe of love, leisure, and liberation, spaces where beauty, intimacy, and self-possession reshape the art historical gaze.

Following acclaimed exhibitions at The Broad (Los Angeles), The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Hayward Gallery (London), and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), this retrospective is the most ambitious presentation of Mickalene Thomas’ work in Paris.

Exhibition produced by GrandPalaisRmn, Hayward Gallery, London, and Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Curators

Rachel Thomas, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery

Lauriane Gricourt, Director at the Musée des Abattoirs de Toulouse

Erin Gilbert, Independent curator

Scenography: Nicolas Groult, Valentina Dodi