Mickalene Thomas New Jersey, USA, b. 1971

Mickalene Thomas was born in New Jersey in 1971 and lives and works in New York.

She studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and later earned a master’s degree from the Yale University School of Art.

Thomas works across a range of media including painting, collage, sculpture, installation, and video. Drawing on popular culture and art history, she proposes a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power.

Through complex portraits, landscapes, and domestic interiors, Thomas explores identity, gender, and their relationship to modes of representing women and feminine space. Mickalene Thomas’s work is distinguished by its multiple fragments and layered planes rendered in intense colors and diverse textures.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at venues such as the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Aperture Foundation, New York; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and La Conservera, Ceutí, among others.

Group exhibitions include presentations at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, and the Long Museum, Shanghai.

In addition, her work is included in international collections such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.