Toulouse. After The Broad in Los Angeles, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Hayward Gallery in London, the Musée-Frac des Abattoirs is the last stage of this exhibition by Mickalene Thomas, in a version enriched with several pieces and luxuriously adapted to the place. The artist, born in 1971 in Camden (New Jersey, United States), is among the 100 most influential personalities of the year according to the 2025 ranking of Time Magazine. But it is her first personal exhibition in France, where she remains little known. The museum therefore deploys an educational journey.
By way of introduction, four large portraits see the visitor, showing the most identifiable facet of Thomas’ work, that which celebrates a sovereign black femininity in compositions mixing painting and rhinestones. The role of photography in this creative process is addressed in the second room, whose hanging shows how this preparatory step has evolved, the photo becoming the work itself. The series of “exotic nudes” is thus made from eroticized images of black women drawn from a magazine from the 1950s, enlarged photos, enhanced with acrylic paint and tinted glass. Mickalene Thomas literally plays with clichés, as the cartels specify-but is it necessary to emphasize it?
The progress of the route adds to each stage a new dimension: after painting and collages, then photography, video installation Angelitos Negros (2016), vibrant of the accents of the singer Eartha Kitt (1928-2008), takes place at the heart of a staging inviting to sit comfortably.
Reconstituted biographical salons
The theatrical scenography plunges the visitor into the artist’s universe thanks to opulent decorations echoing sensuality and materialism of his works. Thus reconstituted interiors of his mother and grandmother, placed in the center of the nave, each fair, in the manner of a Period Roomoffering a hollow portrait of his occupant. The wallpapers designed by the artist also line several rooms, when these are not paved and furnished with large red leather poufs, like that devoted to the paintings of the wrestlers (Brawlin ‘Spitfire Wrestlers, 2007). At the heart of the exhibition, it is however the sobriety of the video Iclose -up, which best expresses sensuality.
In the basement, we find the device that we had seen in 2022 at the Musée de l’Orangerie: as part of its “contemporary counterpoint”, the Parisian institution had indeed presented several works by Thomas-an extension of its residence, ten years ago in the house of Claude Monet in Giverny. Because the American artist continues to look at French painting from the 19th and 20th centuries: evidenced by his reinterpretation of Lunch on the grass from Manet. Or I have a muse (2016), a multimedia installation made up of twelve stacked television screens whose images, by synchronizing, offer a vision of Mickalene Thomas posing in odalisque, alternating with female appearances from classical iconography, such as Leda and the swan by François Boucher. The theme of the odalisque is also available in the second room in the basement.
The imagination of Mickalene Thomas – who claims her homosexuality – is also nourished by the Black erotica (black erotic) of the 1970s, and in particular “Beauties of the week” magazine Jet. With his images of young fetish women, the artist reveals, at the same time as his contradictions, his different sources-in this regard, it might not have been useless to mention in the course the American black artists who preceded and influenced her, like Faith Ringgold or Carrie Mae Weems.
