October 1, 2024 - February 17, 2025
Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade
Mickalene Thomas: Sandra, She's a Beauty, 2009
The moment I started photographing my mother was the moment my work completely changed
— Mickalene Thomas
On the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade this fall from October 1, 2024 – February 17, 2025, the photo collage of a mother, crafted by her daughter, welcomes visitors to the Gardner Museum. Clothed in regal red, Sandra Bush, mother of multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas, both recalls and rejects the dominant canon of Western portraiture with a radiant smile. An artist whose work aims to embolden, Thomas began to photograph Sandra while she was still a student at Yale. This lightning rod moment gave birth to numerous paintings, collage works, and photographs that serve as a daughter’s homage, aspirational mirror, and practice through which to examine the power of self-possessed beauty.
For the Gardner Façade, a public art space for the enjoyment of all, Mickalene Thomas reimagines a photographic collage of Sandra from 2009 in relation to Édouard Manet’s renowned portrait of his own mother in the Gardner's collection. In doing so, Thomas simultaneously immortalizes her first muse and interrogates the nature of how Black women are represented across historical art and contemporary culture.
This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance
$39.95
Portrayals of James Baldwin and others in his circle highlight the iconic writer’s activism
The American writer and activist James Baldwin (1924–87) considered himself a “witness” as he challenged perspectives on America and its history through his work. He was often recognized for speaking out against injustice when other like-minded artists, collaborators and organizers were overshadowed or silenced. By bringing together artworks that feature James Baldwin alongside portraits of other key figures who had an impact on his life, This Morning, This Evening, So Soon situates Baldwin among a pantheon of culture bearers who were instrumental in shaping his life and legacy, particularly in relationship to his advocacy for gay rights. The book accompanies an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, curated by the National Portrait Gallery's Director of Curatorial Affairs, Rhea L. Combs, in consultation with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als. Well-known portraits by Beauford Delaney and Bernard Gotfryd are shown alongside paintings, photographs and films representing key figures in Baldwin’s circle. By viewing Baldwin in this context of community, readers will come to understand how Baldwin’s sexuality and faith, artistic curiosities and notions of masculinity―coupled with his involvement in the civil rights movement―helped shape his writing and long-lasting legacy.
The book relies on portraiture to explore the interwoven lives of Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry (writer and activist), Barbara Jordan (lawyer, educator and politician), Bayard Rustin (leader in social movements), Lyle Ashton Harris (artist), Essex Hemphill (poet and activist), Marlon Riggs (filmmaker, poet and activist) and Nina Simone (singer-songwriter, pianist and activist), among others.
Artists include: Richard Avedon, Glenn Ligon, Donald Moffett, Beauford Delaney, Bernard Gotfryd, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Jack Whitten.
112 pages
Published by DelMonico Books/National Portrait Gallery, 2024
Hardcover
9.2 x 0.6 x 12.7 inches
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love
$60.00
A major monograph chronicling Thomas’ vibrant, rhinestone-adorned painting
New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas’ critically acclaimed and extensive body of work spans painting, collage, print, photography, video, and immersive installations. With influences ranging from 19th-century painting to popular culture, Thomas’ art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while expanding on and upending common definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity, and politics. This major publication further affirms Thomas’ status as a key figure of contemporary art. It features notable works that are arranged in thematic chapters throughout the book.
The book also features an interview with the artist Rachel Thomas and is followed by essays from Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Renée Mussai, and Christine Y. Kim, which cover her distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and tenets of Black feminist theory. In particular, they explore how Thomas subverts art history to reclaim the notions of repose, rest, and leisure in works that celebrate self-expression and joy. For the artist, repose is a radical act, pointing to "what is able to happen once you have the agency."
By Mickalene Thomas
224 pages
Published by D.A.P., 2024
Hardcover
9.25 x 1.25 x 11.5 inches
Mickalene Thomas' Le Dejeuner Jigsaw Puzzle
$39.00
Piece together Mickalene Thomas' evocative work Le Déjeuner sur l'herbs: Les trois femmes noises, that challenges the definitions of beauty and gender found throughout art history. A must have for art admirers, historians and creators alike!
Finished puzzle measures 16" x 11"
Packaging measures 5.9" x 5.9" x 2.75"
Mickalene Thomas Scarf
$162.00
Brooklyn artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate, collage-inspired paintings, embellished with rhinestones, enamel, and colorful acrylics. Her depictions of African American women explore a spectrum of black female beauty and sexual identity while constructing images of femininity and power. Mickalene's practice often examines interior and exterior environments in relation to the female figure, drawing upon references for 70s pop culture.
This delicate silk embodiment of Mickalene Thomas' A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007) communicates complex notions of femininity, power, identity and the relationships between.
Featuring an all-over print with hand-rolled edges, the scarf provides a way to carry Thomas' work with you wherever you go.
Measures 51" x 39.3"
Mickalene Thomas: I Can't See You Without Me
$39.95
Deconstructing the charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer
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.
By Mickalene Thomas, with forward by Sherri Geldin, and contributions by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Michael Goodson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Antwaun Sargent
128 pages
Published by Wexner Center for the Arts, 2018
Hardcover
8.4 x 0.4 x 10.9 inches
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet & Matisse to Today
$50.00
An ambitious and revelatory investigation of the black female figure in modern art, tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art
This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic “other.” Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet’s reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane “New Negro” portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet’s and Matisse’s depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.
Featuring over 175 illustrations and profiles of several models, Posing Modernity illuminates long-obscured figures and proposes that a history of modernism cannot be complete until it examines the vital role of the black female muse within it.
By Denise Murrell
224 pages
Published by Yale University Press, 2018
Hardcover
10.5 x 9.4 x 0.9 inches
Truth Bomb: Inspiration from the Mouths and Minds of Women Artists
$34.95
Learn to embrace life like an artist with this playful compilation of emerging and established women artists.
If anyone can teach readers how to pursue the life and work of an artist, it is the twenty-two amazing artists included in Truth Bomb.
This colorful compilation of pioneering and established women artists from around the world motivates and empowers. Their stories and artworks in this volume challenge readers to find solace in the shared human experiences of birth, death, love, anger, joy, and sadness. Truth Bomb offers the best commentary and insight into the incredible formation of diverse women artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Miranda July, Mickalene Thomas, and the Guerrilla Girls while uncovering the power of taking a chance, pushing the envelope, and ultimately not being afraid of making a mark. Each artist tells a story of resilience, tenacity, sacrifice, and steely determination. The result is a magical visual mash-up of images, memories, historic moments, interviews, and inspirational beginnings as told by artists themselves. Truth Bomb is an ode to art and artists and an attempt to decipher the mystery of creativity.
By Abigail Crompton
208 pages
Published by Thames & Hudson, 2020
Measures 9.3 x 1 x 11.3 inches
Hardcover
Young, Gifted & Black: A New Generation of Artists
$49.95
What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists
This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.
Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that “it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today,” Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself.
Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted and Black in contemporary art.
Artists include: Mark Bradford, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Sadie Barnette, Kevin Beasley, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Bethany Collins, Noah Davis, Cy Gavin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tomashi Jackson, Samuel Levi Jones, Deana Lawson, Norman Lewis, Eric N. Mack, Arcmanoro Niles, Jennifer Packer, Christina Quarles, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Chanel Thomas, Stacy Lynn Waddell, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Brenna Youngblood, and more.
256 pages
Published by D.A.P., 2020
Hardcover
9.5 x 10.5 inches
© 2024 Gift at the Gardner.
