Mickalene and Linder

A word of explanation. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting two exhibitions, one of the radical British feminist artist Linder, one of the radical Black queer American feminist artist, Mickalene Thomas. When I got there I mistakenly thought they shared the same main gallery space, with Mickalene downstairs and Linder upstairs. This was my mistake. Although you buy a joint ticket to both of them, the two exhibitions are completely distinct and you enter them by different doors. The Mickalene is situated in the Hayward’s main gallery with its huge rooms, while you enter the Linder by a different entrance into a series of smaller, more intimate rooms along the ground floor. This is a review of the Mickalene Thomas show. I’ve written a separate review of the Linder show.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

‘The central place of my work, and my art, is from a loving space’

This is an outstanding exhibition, I heartily recommend it. Mickelene Thomas’s paintings, collages, photomontages, videos and installations start big and become huge, filling the cavernous spaces at the Hayward Gallery with bold colours, delirious patterns, glitter and glamour. And then there’s a soundtrack, a continual loop of chilled soul and jazz classics drifting through the gallery which makes the whole thing a lovely Saturday morning experience. And, for me personally, I got chatting to several of the (female) visitor assistants who answered my questions, drew my attention to all kinds of details, and significantly deepened my understanding and enjoyment of the show (see below).

Afro Goddess Looking Forward by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

A reproduction like this gives no sense of the scale of the original, which is nearly 3 yards wide and 2 yards high, completely filling a gallery wall, towering over you and, as you get closer, enfolding in its bright, warm, welcoming designs.

Theory or beauty, issues or love

Born in 1971, Thomas is a Black, queer woman and proud as hell of it. This is catnip to the world of straight white women curators who write lots of wall captions claiming that her work subverts all the usual stereotypes (gender, ethnicity, identity), questions social norms, interrogates the blah blah blah. Thomas is well aware of this, and freely draws on the tenets of Black feminist and queer theory. In fact the title of the exhibition derives from bell hooks’ 2000 book ‘All About Love: New Visions’. Thus every wall label sounds like this:

Thomas work challenges societal norms and provides a powerful counter-narrative to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity…

It may well do all of that, and you can certainly immerse yourself in a critical theory-level response to her art – but what that style of writing doesn’t convey is how beautiful her work is. It’s big and bold and stunning and full of LIFE, full of lovely details and full of LOVE. Don’t need no theory to understand that.

Mickalene Thomas biography

From her Wikipedia article:

Mickalene Thomas (born January 28, 1971) is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas’s collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.

From the press release:

Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, widely renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds embellished with rhinestones. As an artist who fearlessly transcends creative boundaries, her artworks have also adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and emblazoned fashion runways (Dior, 2023).

Love, leisure, and joy

All true, but much nearer the point is the first sentence of the first big wall label:

Mickalene Thomas’s art is an exploration of love, leisure, and joy.

This is certainly the keynote for the works on the ground floor of this two-floor exhibition. They are big and bold and depict friends and lovers and family in a candid, open, vivid and delightful way. Here’s a portrait of her beloved mother, a former fashion model named Sandra Bush, fondly known as Mama Bush.

Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher by Mickalene Thomas (2009) © Mickalene Thomas

Now clearly half a dozen things are going on in this piece so let’s try to unpick them one by one.

Family

Thomas’s paintings depict family, friends and (women) lovers.

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

There are some installations based on her childhood home (see below). As you read about this in the wall labels, as you see the sweet furnishings of the family rooms, as your heart rate goes down to match the smooth jazz soundtrack. It all creates a sense of warmth and love.

Based on photos

Thomas’s creative process begins by photographing her muses in a variety of sets created in her Brooklyn studio. These photos then form the basis of paintings in oil, acrylic and enamel paint which are inlaid with lustrous multi-coloured rhinestones. Originally chosen by the artist as affordable substitutes for oil paints, these materials have since become her signature.

Fabrics

After I’d got over the size, and the bold design and colour, and the use of shiny rhinestones, I began to notice the role of fabric and fabric-style patterning in the works. The figures are almost secondary to the dazzling collage of fabrics of starkly clashing colours and designs.

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas ‘All About Love’. ‘Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge’ (2023). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The overall effect is dramatic but each of the works repays going up close to enjoy the detail of each of these fabrics.

Detail from ‘Naughty Girls Need Love Too’ (2009) by Mickalene Thomas in ‘All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery

As mentioned above, the wall labels overflow with references to queer Black theory, and yet the exhibition can, sort of, be considered an adventure among fabrics. My wife knits, sews, crochets and is fascinated by fabrics and yarns and so, quite oblivious to all the critical theory, spent ages looking very closely at all these fabric designs.

Collage

According to the Tate website:

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface.

Quite clearly, then, the pictures are massive examples of collage in which the photos of friends and family form just the base layer over which she drapes patterned fabrics, cuts and rearranges imagery using the papier collé technique, and studs them with patterns of glittering rhinestones.

‘Collage is how I create form and composition. It’s a way to edit, disrupt, and dismantle – creating a space that is complex, by deconstructing the depth of the field of illusion.’

The wall labels reference a number of influences and even I could see the legacy of Henri Matisse’s cutouts in the more seaweed-shaped designs. But there are plenty of other influences including the Black woman artist Faith Ringgold, whose work we recently saw at the Serpentine Gallery.

The male gaze

‘My gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women.’

Before we move on to the other rooms, let’s address an issue which cropped up in the opening rooms with their enormous portraits, not least because it is mentioned ten or more times in the wall labels, our old friend The Male Gaze.

This concept crops up in more or less every exhibition about or which includes women artists. It is a standard accompaniment to any women’s art which includes depictions of female figures.

The male gaze was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, so it’s 50 years old this year. According to the Wikipedia page:

The male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer… thus reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative.

With the explosion of feminist and critical theory over the past 50 years, the male gaze is now detected in every medium whenever women are portrayed, in not just classical painting, but advertising, films and TV, social media, all forms of literature, you name it.

I get it and I agree with it. What I don’t understand so readily is how all these paintings of scantily-clad young women, generally exposing their breasts, can be said to subvert the male gaze. Surely – without wanting to – they cater to it.

Portrait of Marie by Mickalene Thomas (2015) © Mickalene Thomas

Now one of the reasons I enjoyed my trip so much was because I got into conversations with several of the (female) visitor assistants, who were extremely knowledgeable and very perceptive. I benefited a lot from their insights.

One of these visitor assistants was giving periodic tours of the exhibition. When she’d finished, genuinely puzzled, I asked her how lots of images of scantily-clad, attractive young women with their boobs out was meant to subvert the male gaze. Speaking as a heterosexual male, they seem to me to encourage the male gaze by playing up to every expectation of women as a) beautiful b) lounging on sofas and beds c) half dressed. The visitor assistant made the following three points:

1. Thomas starts a lot of her works with photographs then paints and assembles collages of materials over them. The relevance of this is that her sitters only pose for a few hours i.e. not for days and days on end. I.e. the relationship between artist is less hierarchical, less dominating and demanding.

2. This lack of a male-female power imbalance extends to collaboration. After discussing a backdrop and a pose and what to wear, the subjects then help decide which poses and shots are best, which ones they feel most comfortable with. So, again, less of a male master and woman servant relationship, more a collaboration of equals, and of women equals.

3. She went on to make the rather more obvious point how so much Western art of the beautiful-woman-half-dressed-on-a-divan type was commissioned by rich men to adorn their walls. Many examples of rich men commissioning titillating images of scantily-clad young women to decorate their homes, or even assemble semi-pornographic collections of them in private rooms, where they could be enjoyed (i.e. leched over) by other creepy men. In all of this the woman model had no control whatsoever but was paid a pittance to be converted into a sex object.

Now I understood all these points, and they deepened my understanding of the concept of the male gaze and how women artists depicting the female body operate in a different atmosphere with different aims, and of Thomas’s anti-male gaze ethic. But the assistant didn’t really address my core point which is… they’re still images of half-naked women. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, ‘Male gazers will malely gaze’ and how, in practical terms, are you gong to stop them?

But maybe I’m misunderstanding. Maybe this isn’t about changing society as a whole (stopping men malely gazing) and a much more limited term, an art world term, restricted to describing certain works by certain women artists.

Women at rest

Another apparent contradiction intrigued me. At several points the commentary deprecated the old male art tradition of showing women lying around on beds or divans, thus creating a sexualised boudoir atmosphere for easily aroused male viewers. There are so many paintings like this in the western tradition that it is a genre unto itself, the Odalisque.

The odalisque not only presents women as sexual objects but plays to the gender stereotype which associates The Male with Activity and The Female with Passivity. Active men doing things, bursting with agency. Utterly passive women lying around half-dressed like pets or sex objects, existing solely to please their male owners.

And that’s bad. OK. I get it. The contradiction comes in as you realise that so many of Thomas’s huge paintings show women, er, lying around on beds or divans, half undressed. Why is it sexism and misogyny when painted by men but the exact same subject, with the exact same visual result, is not only ‘reclaimed’ from the male gaze, but is actively liberating, when painted by a woman? Here’s how the curators put it:

Thomas’ celebratory and glamorous portraits put Black women front and centre. Their poses are restful, but filled with power, meeting our gaze and staring right back with regal force.

Or:

These works centre on repose, rest and leisure which, in Thomas’s handling, are shown to be radical acts.

You can see what the curators are trying to do here – to get round the contradiction by rewriting the terms, by changing the vocabulary, by asserting that these works by a woman artists are different from a male depiction of the same subject. But it does it fit the reality of what you actually see? Here’s one of the most notorious odalisques in western art, Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863).

Olympia by Édouard Manet (1863)

Is Olympia not ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’? Whether or not with ‘regal force’ is for the viewer to decide, but the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ is an undeniable fact. So the ‘meeting our gaze and staring right back’ does not distinguish Thomas’s works from the male work she is meant to be ‘subverting’. The real difference lies elsewhere.

Is it in a certain spirit of defiance in the expressions of (some of) the women sitters? Something in their pose and their expressions is markedy, definably different from the passive acquiescent expressions of the classic odalisque? Maybe I’m missing something obvious and you can help me. Anyway, I only dwell on it at such length because 1) this type of pose is the core subject matter of all the works on the ground floor, and 2) the make gaze and how Thomas undermines and subverts it is mentioned in more or less every wall label i.e. it’s a central feature of the curators’ commentary.

A Moment’s Pleasure #2 by Mickalene Thomas (2008) © Mickalene Thomas

Living rooms

Moving on, if you know the Hayward, you know that you then walk up a gently sloping ramp to the second main downstairs space. Here there are a few more massive rhinestone paintings, including her reworking of The Sleep, a painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, given the Thomas treatment. (Later on we meet a big bright reworking of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Eduard Manet. What with the visual references to Matisse’s cutouts, we are learning that Thomas has a fondness for modern nineteenth century French art.)

But more dramatically, here you find a couple of big installations. These are mock-ups or reconstructions of family living rooms Thomas remembers from her childhood. They are designed to transport visitors back to domestic settings of the artist’s 1970s and 1980s childhood. On the left is a room from the late 1970s during Thomas’s early childhood in New Jersey, a homage to her late grandmother.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Of these she says:

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

Inside the installation are two artworks from early in Thomas’s career. The green one at the back is ‘Portrait of Mickalena’, a painted self-portrait in which Thomas performs her childhood alter ego, Quanikah. On the wall on the left is a photographic triptych of her mother from 2003, in which Sandra Bush poses in the style of actor Pam Grier, star of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema

One of the visitor assistants I spoke to was mixed race and she said the rooms triggered warm memories of her childhood. They feel sweet and comfortable and at least part of this is because is this is the source of the mellow soul and jazz music which permeates the ground floor, emanating from a genuine old-school record player and hi fi unit, with ageing record covers by The Supremes and such like, leaning against it at the bottom left.

This hi fi unit is in the second room which recreates a room from Thomas’s teenage years in the 1980s, a completely different vibe from the previous one, this is all shagpile grey carpet and Art Deco lampshades.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 2, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

As to the curators’ commentary:

‘The living room is where we see black imagination made visual’, writes poet Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior. She suggests that the home holds a sacred significance for African Americans who have grappled with the impermanence of place perpetrated by enslavement, segregation and gentrification.

Remember what I was saying about the importance of fabrics, of Thomas collaging together wildly varying and disparate fabrics and patterns? When you look more closely you realise every piece of furniture in room 1 is made of crazy collages of fabrics, patched together, sometimes with very overt stitching. Is this something to do with relative poverty, with having to make do and mend? Or a purely aesthetic statement, in fact it’s a style statement. The visitor assistant I was chatting to made the point that none of the fabrics really ‘go’ with each other and yet, at the same time, because everything is made out of crazy patching, it all, somehow, does go. It makes a Gestalt.

Installation view of ‘I was born to do great things’, room 1, by Mickalene Thomas (2014) Photo by the author

Off to one side of the room is another installation, smaller, dinky, filled with bedroom bric-a-brac, reminding me of my teenage daughter’s bedroom. Takes as a whole the shape is reminiscent of a shrine and it is, in fact, titled Shrine. I’m guessing it is a shrine to her teenage self.

Installation view of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

It’s packed with interesting and charming details. There’s a fridge magnet-style motto which reads: ‘I’m not opinionated, I’m just always right.’ Books by Black and queer authors. And I noticed, underneath a classic photo of Black activist Angela Davies, a picture frame which holds a list of names.

Detail of Shrine by Mickalene Thomas (2024) Photo by the author

Recognise the names?

• Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter and feminist icon
• Kara Walker, the contemporary Black political and feminist artist
• Georgia O’Keefe, woman painter of big bold flowers and scenes of the desert south-western USA

And she’s added her name to the list. Her lineage. Her heroines and herself.

Music

By far the majority of exhibitions I go to are staged in empty, church-like silence, a deadening white-walled sterility as antiseptic as an operating theatre which intimidates visitors into whispering or intimidated silence. The dozen or so sexy, soul music tracks, smooth jazz and soul classics, which play on a loop went a long way to taking the frozen edge off the gallery space and making it a nice place to be.

It made me feel warm and fuzzy about her art, about the rooms she grew up in, about her mum and friends and lovers, it made the whole thing feel warm and welcoming. It made a significant different. Here’s the track list:

• The Glow of Love by Change
• My One and Only Love by Grant Green
• Every Time I Close My Eyes by Kenny G, featuring Babyface
• Bridge Through Time by Lonnie Liston Smith
• Gina by Najee
• Sweet Love by Najee
• Punch Drunk by Sade
• Siempre Hay Esperanza by Sade

Upstairs

Upstairs there are five more rooms, some big, some enormous, more installations, and a wider range of her works, including straight (no pun intended) photography, video installations, and more overtly political works.

The water lilies room

The biggest room features her largest collage to date, an absolutely massive work covering one huge wall (on the left here), in which are embedded ten or more smaller collage pictures. This towers over a lot of plastic rubber plants arranged in a grid pattern on a huge rectangular mirror.

Installation view of La Maison de Monet by Mickalene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I think this is titled ‘La Maison de Monet’ and dates from 2022. In 2011, Thomas took part in a summer residency at Claude Monet’s house and studio located at Giverny, in northern France. Giverny provided Thomas with the opportunity to reflect on Monet’s iconic depictions of gardens and the vibrant domestic spaces that he designed as places of inspiration and leisure. The grid of plastic pot plants represents the famous water lilies in Monet’s garden pond, the lily pond he painted so many times at the end of his life.

On the opposite wall are two more standard-sized works. These are noticeably different from the earlier works in two respects: although they still use jagged-edged collage the elements are mostly plain colour washes instead of intricately decorated fabrics. And no rhinestones. The one on the right reminded me of a record cover from the 1980s, though I can’t remember which one. Can anyone remind me?

Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

A note on laminated flooring

It was only after I’d strolled around the room and looked at the massive wall collage a few times that I began to appreciate the importance of wood in it. On the left you can see photos of a number of wooden shelving units such as you might find at Habitat, while on the bottom right are black and white photos of what looks like laminated wood flooring. Hold that thought…

The wrestling room

Beyond the water lily room is the wrestling room. Here are half a dozen rhinestone and jagged collage-style images of two Black women in various wrestling poses. To quote the curators:

Thomas created her series of Wrestlers to explore multiple sides of herself. All the figures depicted in the paintings are representations of Thomas, featuring the artist Kalup Linzy as her twin. The paintings reveal only one face – the artist’s. The artist considers the series a form of self-portraiture, embodying internal conflicts between our multiple selves within society.

The figures, locked in an embrace, blur the boundaries between erotic pleasure and pain, struggle and affection, dominance and submission, all expressions of desire. The tiger and zebra print leotards worn by the wrestlers can be seen as a critique of the stereotypical and exploitative portrayals of Black women’s strength and sensuality.

Well, as I’ve said in my comments about the male gaze, does dressing Black women in jungle animal leotards (tiger and zebra) ‘critique’ stereotypes about Black women… or subtly confirm them? You, the viewer, decide.

Installation view of the wresting room at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I chatted with the visitor assistant about the bean bags. On the two times I visited the room nobody was sitting on them. Remember I mentioned the wooden shelf units and laminated flooring in the previous room? Well look at the walls here! The stripped varnished pine walls make it feel a bit like a shop, quite a clinical vibe.

Also, you only want to throw yourself on a bean bag if there’s something you really want to spend some time looking at and, I hate to say it, but these were probably the weakest set of works in the show.

But the visitor assistant, as so often, pointed out something I hadn’t noticed, which was the colour red. The bean bags are dark red because all the wrestling images who the two figures wrestling on a dark red blanket. Aha! More like interior decorating than art, the bean bags are visually tied in to the surrounding paintings.

Lastly, most visitors to most of the exhibitions I go to are old. Lots of grey-haired old men and women. I imagine no-one was using the bean bags because pretty much every visitor would struggle to get back to their feet. They’re appropriate to a younger crowd at a younger show and with something to really look at. (I vividly remember the beanbags in a projection room at the Victoria and Albert Museum show about So You Say You Want A Revolution, where you plumped down in a bag to watch excerpts from the rock movie, Woodstock.)

‘Me as Muse’

Round the corner from the lily pond room is a smaller installation, visually tied to it by the present of another clump of rubber plants and titled ‘Me as Muse’. It’s a multimedia video installation meaning there’s a bench and you sit on this and face

Installation view of ‘Me as Muse’ (2016) at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Now what I noticed first about this was the way the bench was made of Thomas’s characteristic patched fabrics. I really liked the bench, vivid and colourful. The wall is covered by a massive montage of mostly black-and-white photos of woods and forest, which are complimented, I suppose, by the rubber plants.

But obviously the centre of attention is the 12 TV monitors. What appears on these screens is a little complicated. The core image is a self portrait of Thomas lying naked on a divan, the classic odalisque pose which prompted all those questions about the male gaze and the history of art and so on, on the ground floor.

What happens then is that different monitors cut to other images, not all at the same time but so that fragments of images are juxtaposed against each other. These other images include two classic odalisque paintings from western art, one by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a more modernist one by Amedeo Modigliani. I think the point is to contrast the representation of Black or ‘exotic’ women in classical male art, with the body of a real Black woman (Thomas herself).

This process goes a step further when the monitors show us a photographic image of Sarah Baartman (1789 to 1815), a Khoikhoi woman from southwestern Africa who was displayed in colonial exhibitions across Europe in the 19th century. This obviously deepens things from just being an art history issue to showing its relationship to the wider world and to historic issues of colonialism, dehumanisation and so on.

So far, so very like an A-level exercise in gender and racial politics. Intercut with all this are clips from a BBC interview with Eartha Kitt in which the famous singer (apparently) speaks candidly about the abuse, suffering and racism she experienced throughout her life. This would have been more powerful if I could have heard anything she said. Maybe there were headphones or a QR code to use on my phone or something, but none of the other visitors who were in this area at the same time as me were listening to anything. Then again maybe the images of a Black woman talking but muted and silenced, were – in a presumably unintentional way – more powerful than hearing her words.

And it’s a collage, isn’t it, just in a different format (video instead of picture). Like the paintings, and the furniture, its basic idea is cutting up and juxtaposing elements from strikingly different sources.

This view shows the geographical relationship between the lily pond room and the TV room (in this photo you can see the Modigliani odalisque on the TV screens), and also shows how the rubber plants – and now I look closely, I can see how the use of black and white stripes and squares – bind the two pieces together. In fact it was only when reviewing my own photos that I realised that immediately behind the monitors are photos of… water lilies in a pond! Surely, they must be shots of Monet’s lily pond. In which case the two installations are really tied together.

Installation view of the upstairs rooms at Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Eartha Kitt sings Angelitos Negros

Eartha Kitt crops up in another work, another multiple screen installation just along the corridor. It consists of four much bigger screens, each one divided into three sub-screens. On them we see face shots of several Black women all singing the same song. The singing feels notably non-professional i.e. like you or me singing in the shower, and it sounds like several voices singing together at once though not in any kind of professional unity or harmony.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

It’s only when you read the wall caption that you realise one of the screens is showing Black singer and actress Eartha Kitt performing her 1953 song Angelitos Negros. In this the singer implores artists to paint Black angels in their religious paintings. ‘You paint all our churches, and fill them with beautiful angels,’ the song laments, ‘but you never do remember, to paint us a Black angel.’ As far as I can tell, in that original video Kitt starts crying so the tone of the music is obviously tearful, if not tragic.

So the other faces and voices are all of Thomas herself singing along. So that explains why there’s a kind of core track which sounds good (Eartha) accompanied by an impassioned by amateur rendition (Mickalene).

What I assume to be several takes of her doing this are cut and pasted into the different channels shown by the monitors, which continually change angle and distance. So it’s yet another example of Thomas’s use of collage, reusing, repurposing, juxtaposing original source material into new combinations.

In a way more striking than the piece itself is the fact that in front of it is something like the living room installations downstairs, a collection of armchairs place on a big carpet, with side tables piled with classics of Black and queer literature.

Installation view of Angelitos Negros by Mickelene Thomas at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Note 1) the way all the furniture is made of patchwork fabric, like the bench in the other TV room, like the furniture in the two living room installations, echoing the intense use of fabric patterns in her rhinestone paintings. 2) Note the use of fake wood laminated tiles, such as you see in flooring shops, visually linking this to the images of cheap wooden furnishing and flooring in the previous installations. And 3) our old friends, the pot plants, also linking this with the other upper gallery installations. It’s not only paintings that can have recurring motifs, but installations too.

The sly way all these displays are tied together by these motifs is enjoyable to decipher and savour. Clever. Very clever, and fun. In the manner of all good art, you feel all these linkages are saying something, something important and meaningful, but can’t work out what. But that’s fine. Art isn’t a scientific thesis. Hints and echoes and implications are what it’s good at. Very clever. Echoes and re-echoes.

Incidentally, the paintings on the wall in the background of this photo are a departure from everything we’ve seen so far. They’re portraits of people right enough, but painted on big mirrors. In fact here on the upper floor there’s a much greater variety of works, a greater range of paintings plus a corridor of simple (i.e. uncollaged) colour photographs, nicely staged and shot.

A note on James Baldwin

The Black American author James Baldwin (1924 to 1987) is frequently encountered in the art world. Why? Because he’s Black, queer and a writer. I’m not being sarcastic or snarky when I say he ticks all the boxes. We live in a liberal culture which is concerned to tick all the boxes – literally in the case of many organisations’ legally binding commitments to diversity and inclusion. In a thoroughly feminist culture like the art world most straight white men are frowned on and excluded. In a backlash against thousands of years of white heteronormative domination, there is currently a wave of exhibitions by Black artists, and an ever-growing number of exhibitions by queer artists.

Baldwin’s writings often address his challenges with identity. When he came of age in the 1940s a man was meant to be white and manly, Clark Gable or John Wayne. Being Black exposed him to the massive race discrimination in 1940s USA, but being queer made him doubly an outsider, especially in his own Black community which was just as homophobic as the white world, if not more so.

After facing years of everyday racism and homophobia, despite the support of other Black writers who spotted his talent, Baldwin in the end fled America, travelling to France in 1948 where he lived for the rest of his life.

It’s not just that Baldwin ticks the boxes, he’s not just an empty figurehead. It’s that he wrote so eloquently about the challenges and complexities of juggling his multiple identities: American, man, Black, gay.

So it is no surprise that in our times, when progressive politics, art and literature are more than ever before concerned with questions of gender and identity, Baldwin is not just a symbol of these issues, but his often very eloquent expressions of them find themselves being quoted again and again, in texts, in documentaries and in countless exhibitions.

When I visited the contentious Masculinities exhibition at the Barbican, supposedly a comprehensive survey of art from around the world about masculinity, no surprise that the massive quotation written in big letters on the wall right at the start of the exhibition was by Baldwin. Not a British writer, a white writer or a straight writer. To define masculinity, to set the keynote in their huge exhibition about masculinity, the curators chose the writing of a gay Black American man.

Not long ago I was at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho and discovered quotes from Baldwin being used in their exhibition of queer photos. And here in the Mickalene show, Baldwin is 1) referenced in the wall captions, specifically the one for the Money installation which aligned Baldwin’s flight to France with Mickalene’s stay there 60 years later. 2) In the Shrine and here in this Earth Kitt installation, when there are little piles of books to make the place look more homely, you can bet your house they’ll include works by Baldwin and guess what? They do. 3) And photos of him appear in Thomas’s series celebrating Black politics, ‘Resist’. He’s everywhere.

I’m not mocking. I’m pointing out that particular periods or eras in history are defined by their economic and technological substructure, and the cultures they produce are marked by particular anxieties and means of expression. So that in an era saturated in issues to do with race and gender, it’s almost inevitable that Baldwin’s eloquent descriptions of the interplay of these issues – not that commercially successful in his own time (the 1950s, 60, 70s) – have come into their own. This goes some way to explaining why his words or image keep cropping up in so many exhibitions I visit.

Sorry for this long digression.

The Black Lives Matter room

The last room I arrived at, the room beyond the Eartha Kitt room, is a cul-de-sac, a comparatively small space and the most ‘political’ room. It contains just three works and these are completely unlike the homespun, family-oriented, bright and joyful vibe of the rhinestone works. They all address the dire state of race relations in contemporary America. They’re examples of a series of works gathered under the collective title ‘Resist’, being:

• Resist #12: Power to the People
• Resist #6: Say Their Names
• Resist #7: Guernica detail

Rather than rewrite them, I’ll quote the curators’ own words:

While Thomas’s art is fundamentally and radically political, this recent series of paintings is explicitly so, centring on Civil Rights activism from the 1960s to the present.

The central painting serves as a memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody, urging the viewer to remember the names of countless victims.

The two flanking paintings explore the central role of Black women within civil rights activism from the 1960s onwards. Thomas finds echoes of the past in the present, layering archival images from the Civil Rights era with images from recent protests and uprisings related to Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements.

Here’s that central work, the ‘memorial to Black men and women who have lost their lives at the hands of U.S. law enforcement or while in custody’.

Installation view of ‘Say Their Names (Resist #6)’ (2021) by Mickalene Thomas in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

If you pull back from the specific names and focus on the dark grey outlines you can see that they echo or in fact repeat the shapes of the animals in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica. As in her copies, pastiches of and homages to classic paintings by Ingres, Manet and Modigliani, you can see 1) her fundamental principle of collage at work, cutting and pasting and incorporating materials from other sources into her own art; and 2) in these particular instances, taking classic works from the canon and rewriting them for her own, modern purposes, to address contemporary social and political issues.

This is a very powerful room and you only have to start thinking about the long, dire history of race relations in America, about American slavery, the civil war, the Jim Crow era, the miserable segregation and racism Afro-Americans suffered for most of the twentieth century, the long battles of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King, through various race riots of the 1960, ’70s’, ’80s and up to the present day with its ongoing litany of Black people killed by white cops and the vast numbers of Black men imprisoned in America’s incarceration complex, to feel yourself completely overwhelmed by the scale and horror of this terrible history and these ongoing horrible realities.

All of which has an undermining effect on the smooth jazz vibe of the ground floor, with its atmosphere of proud women and domestic happiness. This small room casts a long shadow over everything which came before it… But then, we are grown-ups and have to deal with the fact that the world is a troubled, complex and riven place. There’s really very little I can do to influence the community policies of most American police forces. But all the more reason to value the love, leisure and joy which she described at the very start of the show and which those first big collages convey so wonderfully.

Take-home

It’s big, colourful, inspiring, inventive, dark and troubling, all at the same time, all in one big complex feast. Go and see it.

Related links

• Mickalene Thomas: All About Love continues at the Hayward Gallery until 5 May 2025
• Mickalene Thomas works online

Related reviews

• Hayward Gallery reviews
• Reviews of women artists