Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

11 Feb-5 May 2025

Overview

Mickalene Thomas’ vibrant, large-scale portraits of Black women at rest reclaim space and representation in art history, celebrating love and radical repose.

All About Love presents two decades of work by the internationally celebrated artist and pioneering portraitist Mickalene Thomas (born 1971, USA).

Thomas is renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women radically luxuriating and in repose, adorned with vivid patterns and ravishing, brilliant rhinestones, as well as her innovative use of collage techniques.

Thomas’s depictions of women from her circle of friends, family, lovers and models are loving, celebratory and glamorous, with her alluring and self-assured muses exuding comfort and pleasure.

References to the history of European painting abound in Thomas’s work (including to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso). Her subjects confidently claim space within this male-dominated art history from which Black and LGBTQI+ people have largely been excluded.

Featuring paintings, photographs, collages and installations, All About Love transforms the Hayward Gallery with bespoke wallpapers, textiles and furnishings nostalgically evoking the artist’s 1970s childhood.

Thomas’s art is steeped in contemporary feminist literature and the exhibition title pays loving homage to the late American author and activist Bell Hooks.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is co-organized with The Broad, Los Angeles and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.