Mickalene Thomas

I Can ́t See You Without Me, 2018

Pages: 128 pgs / 40 color
Format: Paperback
Size: 8.5 x 11 in
Text: Sherri Geldin. Text by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Michael Goodson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Antwaun Sargent
Publisher: D.A.P. Exclusive

€40.00

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About the work

I Can ́t See You Without Me, 2018

Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971).

Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer. Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas' compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations.

By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.

Foreword by Sherri Geldin. Text by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Michael Goodson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Antwaun Sargent.

About artist

Mickalene Thomas

New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel

Mickalene Thomas (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) makes paintings, collages, photography, video, and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, Thomas constructs complex portraits, landscapes, and interiors in order to examine how identity, gender, and sense-of-self are informed by the ways women (and “feminine” spaces) are represented in art and popular culture.

Thomas received a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2000 and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2002. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO (forthcoming, 2019); The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL (2019); The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2019); Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA (2019); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France (2019); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON (2018); The Dayton Art Institute, OH (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2018); Pomona College Museum of Art (2018), Claremont, CA (2017); Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (2017); Newcomb Art Museum, Tu...

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