The art critic Jerry Saltz recently described Mickalene Thomas’s work as “a brick thrown through the window of art history.” Perhaps this was in reference to the way her nude portraits subvert the traditional male gaze or how her portrayal of Black queer female bodies challenges ingrained hierarchies. Or maybe it’s because of her unconventional use of craft supplies like rhinestones, felt, and glitter or because her mixed media paintings refuse formal categorization. While there’s no doubt that Thomas’s work is both irreverent and disruptive, that’s only half the story. As Thomas told, “Sometimes things have to be broken in order to be made whole.”

Thomas reimagines our broken world restored by love, color, and sequence in her newly opened survey exhibition at The Broad in Los Angeles, which includes over 90 works made over the last 20 years. With stops in London, Philadelphia, and Toulouse, France, the exhibit also marks the first major international tour of the artist’s work. Its title, All About Love, borrows from feminist author bell hooks’s seminal text of the same name and emphasizes the redemptive facets of Thomas’s practice.

The revolution begins at home, which for Thomas is Camden, N.J. “My home is your home,” she said as she welcomed visitors beneath the elaborate façade of tidy row houses and into the faux-wood paneled tableau inspired by her family’s 1970s living room, at a press preview of the show. Replete with floral-patterned furniture, a record player, an array of houseplants, and a triptych of her mother and first muse, Sandra Bush, the room is equal parts mesmerizing and inviting. For Thomas, domestic spaces have long offered respite from the perils of racism and oppression faced by Black and queer people. Creating a familiar place of acceptance and community within the once unwelcoming public sphere is a radical act of reclamation. “No matter what’s happening in your life outside, once you walk through the door, you’re here. You’re welcomed and accepted,” Thomas said.

Her subjects, often portrayed luxuriating in one another’s company, are either erotically entangled or engaged in an intimacy that manifests as deep, enduring friendship. They assume positions of rest, relaxation, and leisure. Thomas consistently reappropriates art-historical poses and reimagines famous paintings by French male artists like Gustave Courbet and Henri Matisse.Thomas confounds narrow beauty standards and restores agency to the fully realized women basking in their own sensuality.

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on view at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles through September 29, 2024.

Photos Courtesy of Mickalene Thomas