Barnes Foundation Presents “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love”

East Coast debut of first major international tour of Mickalene Thomas’s work

October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025
Press Preview: Tuesday, October 15, 9:30 am

Philadelphia, PA, August 1, 2024—In fall 2024, the Barnes Foundation will present Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, the first major international tour focused on the work of pioneering artist Mickalene Thomas, whose influences range from 19th-century painting to popular culture. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and Les Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse, All About Love is being shown as a series of independent presentations, with further venues to be confirmed. Curated for the Barnes by Renée Mussai, independent curator, scholar, and writer, this exhibition will be on view in the Roberts Gallery from October 20, 2024, through January 12, 2025.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal. Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund, Denise Littlefield Sobel, the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, Emily and Michael Cavanagh, Ralph Citino and Lawrence Taylor, Marianne N. Dean, Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry, Sarah Morthland, Ogilvie Family Foundation, Dalila Wilson-Scott and S. Christopher Scott, Josephine and Sam Switzenbaum, Brenda A. and Larry D. Thompson, an anonymous donor, and other generous individuals.

All About Love, titled in homage to cultural critic, intellectual, and writer bell hooks, marks its East Coast debut at the Barnes with approximately 50 works made by Thomas over the past two decades. Showcasing a body of vivid and multifaceted artworks paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation, this exhibition celebrates her distinctive artistic practice.

Thomas’s work is characterized by spectacularly staged, rhinestoned, large-scale painted tableaux and bold, intimate compositions, decisively foregrounding Black femininity in abundant realms of visual pleasure, agency, and kinship. Whether in imaginative dialogue with canonical works from the history of art or playfully reckoning with popular culture and erotica, Thomas’s exuberant portraitures offer an empowered vision of beauty and desire, formulated through a sensual, Black feminist lens.

“In her work, Mickalene Thomas often recasts scenes from 19th-century French paintings, like those well represented in the Barnes collection, in striking tableaux that champion Black figuration, sensuality, and power,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President. “We are delighted to present the East Coast debut of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, part of a major international touring project, and Thomas’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. We are honored to share her extraordinary and influential work with our community and beyond.”

“All About Love at the Barnes is an embodied visual love letter that moves through different temperatures, honoring the intimate and transformative qualities of Mickalene Thomas’s expansive practice,” says curator Renée Mussai. “Her artistic universe is forged from deep within the richly textured Black feminist ero-poetics of desire, where visual pleasures reside abundantly, and the powers of love of dedicated being, seeing, and looking are harnessed, amplified, beautified: exquisitely rendered, deliciously gendered.”

Featuring paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation from public and private collections, Mickalene Thomas: All About Loveis arranged in a series of thematic chapters that showcase the artist’s iterative practice, offer an in-depth look at select muses who appear throughout Thomas’s oeuvre, and highlight the artist’s continual dialogue with canonical works by Monet, Picasso, and Courbet, represented in the Barnes collection.

Exhibition highlights include:

• The celebrated Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires, 2010, a monumental work measuring 10 feet by 24 feet (120 × 288 in. / 304.8 × 731.5 cm)
• Me as Muse, 2016, a site-specific moving-image installation featuring 12 video monitors
• Excerpts from an expansive body of collage works made between 2021 and 2023, from the Jet Blue and Nus Exotiques series.
  
• The seminal Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015, as featured on the cover of the accompanying catalogue.
• A recent larger-than-life iteration of Tête de Femme completed in 2022, with rhinestones, glitter, Swarovski crystals, fabric, oil pastel, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas.
  
• Early painted works from the Brawlin’ Spitfire wrestling series.
  

Concurrent with the exhibition, the Barnes will also present four monumental photo collage panels by Thomas, titled Noir est beau (Joséphine Baker 3), on the east end of the Annenberg Court. Originally created for Dior’s 2023 couture runway show, the embroidered panels feature archival images of pioneering Black performer and activist Josephine Baker, who served as muse to Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri for the 2023 show. The four panels that will be on view during All About Love are among 13 tapestries that were created for the runway’s scenography, all featuring women who inspire Thomas and who, she states, “with the odds set against them, persevered with confidence, elegance, beauty, and talent.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) is one of the most influential artists today; her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. Thomas completed her MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003, and soon after became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose using rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolizes the complexities of femininity. Depicting women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Award–nominated co-producer, curator, educator, and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. She lives and works in New York. More information.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Renée Mussai is a London-based independent curator, scholar, and writer with a special interest in Black feminist visual arts practices. As the former senior curator and head of curatorial and collections at Autograph, London, Mussai has organized numerous critically acclaimed group and solo exhibitions internationally and was responsible for a diverse range of artist commissions, publications, and research initiatives for more than two decades. Alongside her curatorial and scholarly practice, she is a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg and an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London; between 2009 and 2020, she was guest curator and non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. In 2023, Mussai served as co-curator for R/evolutions, the 14th edition of PhotoIreland Festival, and artistic director of the Walther Collection. Her publications include the award-winning artist monographs Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night (2020) and Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama (2018; 2024); the co-edited volumes Care, Contagion, Community: Self & Other (2021) and Ecologies of Care: Speculative Photographies, Curatorial Re-Positionings (2020); and the forthcoming Eyes That Commit—A Visual Gathering and Black Chronicles—Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain (both 2025).

CATALOGUE
A publication will accompany the exhibition, including Mickalene Thomas in conversation with Hayward Gallery chief curator Rachel Thomas and essays by Claudia Rankine, Darnell L. Moore, Ed Schad, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Renée Mussai, and Christine Kim that cover Thomas’s distinct visual vocabulary, drawing on themes of love and intergenerational female empowerment as well as tenets of Black feminist theory.

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes and Les Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse. The presentation at the Barnes is curated by independent curator, scholar, and writer Renée Mussai.

SPONSORS
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal.

Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund, Denise Littlefield Sobel, the Edna W. Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, Emily and Michael Cavanagh, Ralph Citino and Lawrence Taylor, Marianne N. Dean, Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry, Sarah Morthland, Ogilvie Family Foundation, Eileen Rosenau, Dalila Wilson-Scott and S. Christopher Scott, Josephine and Sam Switzenbaum, Brenda A. and Larry D. Thompson, an anonymous donor, and other generous individuals.

Ongoing funding for exhibitions comes from the Christine and Michael Angelakis Exhibition Fund, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, the Lois and Julian Brodsky Exhibition Fund, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Christine and George Henisee Exhibition Fund, the Aileen and Brian Roberts Exhibition Fund, and the Tom and Margaret Lehr Whitford Exhibition Fund.

In addition, funding for all exhibitions comes from contributors to the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Fund:

Joan Carter and John Aglialoro, Julia and David Fleischner, Victoria McNeil Le Vine, Leigh and John Middleton, Jeanette and Joe Neubauer

John Alchin and Hal Marryatt, Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Lois and Julian Brodsky, N. Judith Broudy, Elaine W. Camarda and A. Morris Williams, Jr., Eugene and Michelle Dubay, Penelope P. Harris, Jones & Wajahat Family, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Victor F. Keen and Jeanne Ruddy, Marguerite Lenfest, Maribeth and Steven Lerner, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, The Park Family, Wendy and Mark Rayfield, Anne and Bruce Robinson, Adele K. Schaeffer, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Donna and Jerry Slipakoff, Dr. and Mrs. Eugene E. Stark, Joan F. Thalheimer, Bruce and Robbi Toll, van Beuren Charitable Foundation, Kirsten White, Randi Zemsky and Bob Lane, Anonymous.

ABOUT THE BARNES FOUNDATION
The Barnes Foundation is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution that shares its unparalleled art collection with the public, organizes special exhibitions, and presents programming that fosters new ways of thinking about human creativity. The Barnes collection is displayed in ensembles that integrate art and objects from across cultures and time periods, overturning traditional hierarchies and revealing universal elements of human expression. Home to one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings—including the largest groups of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne in existence—the Barnes brings together renowned canvases by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Vincent van Gogh, alongside African, Asian, ancient, medieval, and Native American art as well as metalwork, furniture, and decorative art.

The Barnes Foundation was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” A visionary collector and pioneering educator, Dr. Barnes was also a fierce advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, women, and the economically marginalized. Committed to racial equality and social justice, he established a scholarship program to support young Black artists, writers, and musicians who wanted to further their education. Dr. Barnes became actively involved in the Harlem Renaissance, during which he collaborated with philosopher Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, the scholar and activist, to promote awareness of the artistic value of African art.

Since moving to Philadelphia in 2012, the Barnes Foundation has expanded its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice, teaching visual literacy in groundbreaking ways; investing in original scholarship relating to its collection; and enhancing accessibility throughout every facet of its programs.

The Barnes Foundation is situated in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. Read our Land Acknowledgment.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Deirdre Maher, Director of Communications
215.278.7160, press@barnesfoundation.org
Online press office: barnesfoundation.org/press