Curators in Conversation: Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) is one of today’s most influential artists. 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 became known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose. Her confident and assured subjects are often depicted in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. She lives and works in New York.
Photo by Emil Horowitz

Mussai is a London-based independent curator, scholar, and writer with a special interest in Black feminist and queer visual arts practices. From 2010–22, she served as senior curator and head of curatorial & collections at Autograph, London, where she organized numerous critically acclaimed group and solo exhibitions and was responsible for a diverse range of commissions, publications, and research initiatives. In 2023 Mussai served as chief curator and artistic director of the Walther Collection, New York, and Neu-Ulm, Germany, and as co-curator for R/evolutions, the 14th edition of PhotoIreland Festival in Dublin.
Photo © Christa Holka