Mickalene Thomas. Sista Sista Lady Blue, 2007; chromogenic print; 40 3/8 x 48 1/2 in. © Mickalene Thomas/Artists Rights Society, New York. Courtesy of SFMOMA, San Francisco. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel.

In the current political moment, in which women and people of color struggle (as always, but now even more tangibly) for visibility, Matisse/Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)—two canonical artists shown in cross-generational conversation—is a bit too pretty, perfect, and White-male-centered. Does Matisse need another show? Is this exhibition, heavily publicized by this major institution, relevant today? It’s a gendered imbalance of male painters of female subjects, again. As a Mexican female critic and artist, I enjoyed Matisse/Diebenkorn the way one enjoys art history that feels distant; like overhearing someone else’s conversation, I had the feeling of being somewhere I did not belong.

Yet, after I passed through the exhibition’s exit, one more room sparked my hope and excitement. Accessible without a surcharged ticket, this exhibition was also curated by Matisse/Diebenkorn curator Janet Bishop, and had its own wall text and title. M/D: Coda operates as a footnote—or even punctuation—to the main show, ending it with an ellipsis, rather than a full stop.

This appendix, which features Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Bechtle, Elizabeth Payton, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, and Mickalene Thomas, brought Matisse and Diebenkorn’s influence into a contemporary dialogue by showing how their lineages extend to other artists across time. Most importantly, this gallery showcases artists of other identities. Whereas women are only subjects of representation in Matisse/Diebenkorn, M/D: Coda presents women as authors of images. Thomas’s Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007) struck me the most in this regard.

The photograph, a staged portrait, features a confident woman on a couch, surrounded by patterned textiles that create a soft, colorful setting. Her gaze pierces back at viewers. Another woman figure, reflected in a background mirror, also gazes back. This piece is unapologetic and empowering: a woman who looks back, a woman who stages representation, and a woman who quotes Matisse and updates his work to this time—a moment when a woman of color deserves her own construction of visibility.

Matisse/Diebenkorn’s relationship to M/D: Coda becomes a matter of real estate. Five artists are compressed in one last gallery—an exhibition that exists to make amends. Although I salute and value this coda, the distribution of artists could change even more, so that the distribution of representation appears to be more timely and balanced. Could we perhaps imagine a Mickalene Thomas solo show that ends with a small gallery with a few Matisse paintings?

M/D: Coda will be on view through May 29, 2017.

Carolina Magis Weinberg is a whether reporter, and a sight specific artist and critical writer. Her projects investigate discrete forms of otherness such as the accent, which she considers to expand from orality, becoming a visual form in the production of the migrating maker.

Mickalene Thomas. Collage Wall, 2009-2016; installation view. Photo: Jeffrey Johnston.

This question is not small, and its profundity is rendered expansively in Thomas’s large-scale paintings of women, which are arguably her most recognizable work. Whether her subject is a friend, relative, or stranger, Thomas finds a way to articulate their power and beauty by engaging the history of female representation. Though the work in the exhibition utilizes various genres and media, the strength of much of Thomas’s work is clearly rooted in a deep investment in the history of painting, its long tradition of masters and masterpieces, and the generations of audiences that have accepted its tropes and icons. Thomas’s work both depends on this rich context and smartly subverts it by claiming its own space within a tradition that has largely excluded, demeaned, and caricatured persons of color and women.

Mickalene Thomas. Shinique: Now I Know, 2015; rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels).

Thomas’s intervention into the grand narrative of the lounging nude and the seduction of the female body—a lineage that runs from Titian to Manet to Matisse—is staged most performatively in Shinique: Now I Know (2015). With her back to the viewer and head swiveled toward us, Shinique’s gaze plucks at the heart of a visual tradition dependent upon looking at women, but which has rarely provided the female sitter with such control over the space outside the picture plane. Under Thomas, the archetype is called up only to be destroyed—the enticing seduction of the female figure only recapitulates the strength of the sitter’s presence. These women aren’t being looked at, they are looking at you. Not only does Thomas upset the power dynamics at work between passive sitter and active viewer, which structure the history of art, she makes a case for upsetting a gendered dynamic beyond the space of the picture.

Mickalene Thomas. Ain’t I a Woman: Keri (2009) and Diptych (2009); rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel; DVD and framed monitor; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Artist Rights Society (ARS). Photo: Jeffery Johnston.

Thomas’s intention to articulate the constructed, “slippery” potential of female selfhood is put to work through her employment of different materials, techniques, and juxtapositions of different visual genres within her paintings and collages. The encounter of both painting and video—the stilled self and the self in motion—are moments of great strength in the exhibition, and acknowledge the artifice and consequence that exists at the heart of all representation. Oscillating between two separate works, Thomas’s painted homage to Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech of Black female empowerment, “Ain’t I a Woman,” and a religious altarpiece, Diptych presents the sexy, Black female body sculpted out of flat planes of primary colors in two dimensions on the left (a gesture reminiscent of the painterly techniques of her idols Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden), and in a televised two dimensions on the right. Thomas is asking us to look at these two images together; the back and forth required in creating unity out of a presented duality forces a consideration of the slippery self, as well as Truth’s speech: Isn’t it a woman? Is it not? What is a woman? Who decides? The subject or the surveyor? What, or where, is woman when her likeness is rendered flat on a wall or screen? When is the self most recognizable? Authentic? Staged? Embodied?

Mickalene Thomas. Waiting on a Prime-Time Star, 2016; mixed media; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Newcomb Museum of Art at Tulane University (New Orleans, LA). Photo: Jeffery Johnston.

The true highlight of the exhibition is Thomas’s re-creation of a flashy, glamorous domestic space filled with nostalgic 1970s interior design fads and references. By creating a space where her figures might live, relax, lounge, and cavort, Thomas points to the ways in which identity is created and constructed by things, spaces, and forces outside of our own physical bodies. In a true celebration of the self as a constellation of “stuff”—visible and invisible to the eye—Thomas poses an emancipatory narrative of female Blackness that is transposed and transformed across times, spaces, and persons. Within this space, the voice of Thomas’s mother echoes from the video interview, “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman” (2012). Her voice undulates across the staged installation—a reminder that history is inalienable from the present, as is the projected self inalienable from the imagined.  This notion of playful bifurcation—or the understanding that the self is a fractured and multifarious process and product of becoming, scattered across both the artist’s representation and the sitter’s own performance of it—calls attention to the hybrid foundations that define Black femaleness and beauty in today’s world.

Mickalene Thomas: Waiting on a Prime-Time Star will be on view at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University through April 9, 2017.

[1] The impossible unification of the self is a great theme of Jacques Lacan’s work. See “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Jacques Sheridan, (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2004), 3–9. The reference to the French psychotherapist is not out of bounds, as Mickalene Thomas has discussed the impact of Lacan’s writing on “the mirror stage” as being tremendously important to her work in interviews and other publications.

Fahamu Pecou. Rock.Well (Radiant Pop, Champ) (After Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self Portrait), 2010; acrylic on canvas; 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of Scott and Teddi Dolph and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

Taking the concept of the remix as a theme, the show features forty artists who recontextualize familiar visual forms in their own works. Several works interpret famous pieces from art history and popular culture. As such, the show exemplifies a dialectic model in which the works are synthesized through the artists’ engagements with art history. Instead of focusing on collage and digital media—two formats closely aligned with the concept of the remix—the curators also present works in more traditional media, such as painting and drawing, that evince the diversity of creativity.

In the exhibition, the artworks that plainly cite famous predecessors introduce the idea of the remix. One of the first such works encountered is Fahamu Pecou’s Rock.Well (Radiant, Pop, Champ) (After Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self Portrait) (2010). Pecou’s version of the popular painting replaces Rockwell’s artistic influences (Dürer, Rembrandt, Picasso, and van Gogh) with his own: Muhammad Ali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andy Warhol. Bob Thompson’s Bathers (1964) is a scintillating amalgamation of similar erotic scenes painted by Europeans such as Paul Cézanne and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; Thompson’s insertion of Black bodies into the picture reminds the viewer of the exploitive, exoticist paintings of the late 18th century. Similarly, Robert Colescott’s brilliant and sardonic Between Two Worlds (1992) blurs racial boundaries by portraying the figure in Diego Velazquez’s famed Toilet of Venus (1647, known as “the Rokeby Venus”) as a Black woman with a White reflection; her palpable angst in this scenario anticipates the country’s current inability to reconcile racial differences more than two decades later.

Renee Cox. Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, 1998; dye destruction print, mounted on Diasec; 48 ½ x 61 ½ in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

A number of artists use pop-culture references within their work, and the majority of such works specifically engage the facets of the dominant culture that marginalize and caricature Black bodies. Damond Howard’s Untitled Diptych from his Wearing the Mask series (2007) features two large charcoal drawings that juxtapose his own body with a blackface caricature. The artist’s pose mimics that of the inflammatory cartoon, but his performance of it forcefully establishes his own identity as a Black man. Krista Franklin riffs on the infamous album cover of the Ohio Players’ 1975 release Honey, which features a nude woman seductively consuming the eponymous substance. Whereas the original image presents the woman as an object of desire, Franklin’s collage Oshun as Ohio Player(s) (2013) extrapolates from the album cover, portraying the woman as the Yoruba goddess Oshun. Iona Rozeal Brown’s A3 Blackface #65 (2003) is reminiscent of a Japanese woodblock print of a female entertainer: The woman in blackface presents a stark contrast to the typically white makeup of a geisha.

Damond Howard. Untitled Diptych from Wearing the Mask series, 2007; charcoal on paper; each 84 x 57 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

In the exhibition’s final gallery is a juxtaposition that encapsulates the central conceit of the show. On one wall stands a massive work by Mickalene Thomas, Three Graces: Les Trois Femmes Noires (2011). Using vivid colors and rhinestones, Thomas’s rendition updates the classical trio of nude figures as a monumental portrait of three powerful black women. Opposite this work is Tarleton Blackwell’s Hog Series CCX: Las Meninas (Diptych) (1999), an imaginative version of Velazquez’s 1656 masterpiece. Replacing the Spanish royal family with his own family—and several hogs—in this exuberant painting, Blackwell positions himself as Velazquez, collapsing the divide between one of Spain’s most famous painters and a contemporary artist living in a small town in South Carolina. Blackwell’s expressive, painterly style and jocular humor contrast with the power and grace of Thomas’ painting, yet both works synthesize facets of the art-historical canon with the artists’ experiences as African Americans in Western culture.

Colin Quashie. Plantation Monopoly, 2012; mixed media; 20 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina.

With a multitude of works on display, the exhibition presents the results of this dialectical model. In an essay for the catalog, the independent curator Jonell Logan emphasizes that “the artists participating in the exhibition are not borrowing from western culture; they are of western culture [sic].”[1] This distinction is crucial to understanding the work of artists who have historically lacked access to mainstream institutions. The nuance elucidated by this show will help as curators continue to erode the barriers and mythologies that persist in a global art world.

Remix: Themes and Variations in African-American Art is on view at the Columbia Museum of Art through May 3, 2016.

Mickalene Thomas. Le dejeuner sur l’herbe: trois femmes noires, 2010; C-print; artist proof 2/2; 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Lehmann Maupin, NY and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In GLYPHS: Acts of Inscription, there are several different ways that the artists interact with the concept of the African Diaspora. Working in photography or video, the artists use images as “acts of inscription,” real or imagined, to change, re-imagine, or fill in the gaps of the “visual archives that constitute history, popular iconographies, and artistic canons.”[1]

The first approach is documentary, to give visibility to a group that isn’t adequately represented in popular culture or art historical canons. An anchoring piece in the show is W.E.B. Du Bois’ original counter archive: The Paris Albums 1900, a series of portraits commissioned for his award-winning American Negro Exhibit in the 1900 Paris World Exposition. This was groundbreaking; first and foremost, it was the first time Black Americans were allowed to represent themselves at a world’s fair. A mere generation after emancipation, Du Bois presented graphs, data, and maps showing the history and changes in education, literacy, and patent- and land-ownership along with some 500 photographs depicting the lives and communities of African Americans at the turn of the century. These images were transgressive because they presented a positive image of an emerging black middle class—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and students—images that Du Bois said, “hardly square with conventional American ideas.”[2]

Zanele Muholi, Mbali Zulu, Kwatherna, Springs, Johannesburg, 2010 or Amanda Mapurna, Vredehoek, Cape town from Faces and Phases, 2011; silver gelatin print; 20 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Du Bois believed in the power of photography as a political tool to institute change. Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases series (2006-present) uses photography in a way similar to Du Bois’ Paris Albums; that is, to create a counter-archive that presents a marginalized group in a new and positive light. Dubbing herself a “Visual Activist,” she presents a series of black-and-white portraits of black lesbians in South Africa, highlighting each woman’s unique individuality and humanity in order to bring visibility to her community and to help end the violent discrimination directed towards this group in South Africa.

Cheryl Dunye, Introducing Fae Richards: Excerpts from The Watermelon Woman, 2013 (film still photograph by Zoe Leonard); video; color; sound; 6:20. Courtesy of the Artist.

A different approach is to use complete fiction in order to create an alternate and more ideal history. The best example of this is Cheryl Dunye’s video: Introducing Fae Richards: Excerpts from The Watermelon Woman (2013). In her debut feature film, Dunye created a fake documentary about a beautiful black lesbian 1930s film actress, Fae Richards, credited only as “The Watermelon Woman.” Originally made in 1997, Dunye produced a directorial recut focusing on the Fae Richards archive for this exhibition. While the concept is strong and the images are believable as a historical archive (they were commissioned from and created by photographer Zoe Leonard), the narration and plot feel dated, while other pieces in the show from before the year 2000 remain fresh.

John Akomfrah, Peripeteia, 2012 (film still); HD video; color; sound; 18:12. Courtesy of Carroll/Fletcher and Smoking Dogs Films, London.

British director and artist John Akomfrah also uses fiction, but instead of creating an alternate history, he attempts to fill in the gaps of what we already know. The video Peripeteia (2012) begins with two drawings by the sixteenth century German artist Albrecht Dürer, Head of a Negro Man (1508) and Portrait of the Moorish Woman Katharina (1521), two of the earliest representations of black people in Western art. Everything about these individuals’ lives is lost except for these portraits. In Peripeteia, Akomfrah imagines their lives outside of Dürer’s drawings. One of the most visually stunning works of the show, the characters wander through the misty countryside alone among the ruins. Symbolically, this isolated environment enhances the sense that these people have been lost to European history.

Carrie Mae Weems, Not Manet’s Type, 2010 (detail); series of 5 digital prints; edition of 5, with 2 artist proofs; 40 x 20 inches each. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Carrie Mae Weems’ five-part series examines her own identity and physicality as a black woman in the context of art history, taking a similar substantive approach as Mickalene Thomas, although an extremely different visual approach. Her series is comprised of five nude or semi-nude self-portraits in a bedroom with text that comments on the absence or objectification of black women’s bodies in the history of modern art. In her words, “It was clear, I was not Manet’s type, Picasso—who had a way with women—only used me, and Duchamp never even considered me.”

GLYPHS allows an underrepresented group in the arts to represent themselves. Each of the artists deals with identity by focusing on the complexities of individuality, which ultimately has a humanizing effect and which emphasizes the dangers of assigning individuals to any one category. In “an art season that could make you think that the feminist movement never happened because we’re looking at almost entirely [white] male monographic shows,” GLYPHS is a breath of fresh air.[3]

GLYPHS: Acts of Inscription is on view at the Pitzer College Art Galleries through December 5, 2013 and is curated by Ruti Talmor and Renée Mussai.

[1]From the GLYPHS show description: http://www.pitzer.edu/galleries/

[2] W.E.B. Du Bois quote from The American Negro at Paris: http://www.webdubois.org/dbANParis.html

[3] Deborah Solomon, interview on WNYC 93.9 FM radio, September 12, 2013: http://www.wnyc.org/story/317373-art-talk-whats-hot-fall-art-season-white-men/

Mickalene Thomas, "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 144". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Gallery.

A group called R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance) regularly performs at the Echoplex in Echo Park. They appeared at Bootie L.A., a monthly mash-up party, this past Saturday, wearing shimmering orange body-suits and making awkward movements that somehow still seemed organic. R.A.I.D. practitioners have all different sorts of bodies—beer bellies, jutting hip bones, love handles—and they’re not necessarily good dancers. “No formal dance training required, in fact, having two left feet might be a plus,” reads their recruitment blurb on tribe.net. Sometimes they look like Isabella Rossellini did dressed as a snail for her Green Porno video: confident, cartoon-like and uncomfortably seductive. In costume and on stage, the dancers have a not-quite-human, object-like aura that makes them seem empowered, though it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are empowered to do.

I first saw R.A.I.D. the same night I saw Mickalene Thomas’s second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Projects. The bodies in Thomas’s garnished paintings also exude an object-like prowess and, like watching R.A.I.D., looking at Thomas’s work makes object, objectification, and objection all slide into each other. The bodies Thomas depicts become part of the fragmented, textured décor around them. And becoming décor, it turns out, can be as much a crutch as an asset.

Mickalene Thomas, "Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl", Installation view, Solo Exhibition Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2010.

Called Put Some Sugar in My Bowl, the exhibition includes ten glossy enamel paintings on panel, each embedded with rhinestones, Thomas’s favorite accoutrement. The exhibition’s title approximates the refrain of I Need Some Sugar in My Bowl, a saucily unhurried Bessie Smith song that later mellowed into a Nina Simone ballad. The exhibition, like the song, exudes a grown-up sense of longing that manifests through stuff—for Bessie and Nina, the stuff consisted of bowls, foodstuff and a little steamed-up clothing; Thomas’s stuff tends to be drapery, paneling and bling. But while the song has loose riffs and paced pauses between stanzas, Thomas’ paintings have jutting fragments of pattern and flourishes that collide with one another.

In Love’s Been Good #3, a black woman with daunting blue eye shadow and audacious red lipstick that makes her look like she could be in drag, sits in front of a sofa made up of so many collaged patterns it becomes difficult to identify. Her sarong falls open and drapes down onto the floor, leaving her legs exposed. Her feet—she wears purple, rhinestone-bejeweled heels—can’t seem to find a comfortable place to rest.

"Love's Been Good To Me #3", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 72". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

Thomas’s work is often discussed in relation Ingres’s and Matisse’s Odalisques. This makes sense. Thomas plays with art historical poses, her figures lounging across the picture plane, and odalisques tend to look slightly uncomfortable in their painted poses—sometimes because, as in the case of Ingres’s 1814 The Grand Odalisque, they have a few too many vertebrae, or, as with Matisse’s 1921 Odalisque, they seem about to tumble off a sofa. In Thomas’s repertoire, the women haven’t been made uncomfortable as much as they’ve made themselves that way–the way the figure in Give Me the Love I Need stacks her legs on top of each other would require steady muscle power to maintain, but she seems to know that. “Uncomfortable” becomes a self-protective strategy augmented by the patterned stuff that populates each painting and competes with the figures for attention.

Odalisques are property, concubines that belong to someone. Thomas’s women have property, want property, embody property. “I feel like the rhinestones in my paintings are like the really glossy lipstick that women wear,” Thomas said in an interview with Nylon Magazine. “It’s another layer of masking.” Kara Walker wrote about Thomas for Bomb Magazine a year ago: “Thomas’s Soul Sisters gaze out from between contrasting arrays of color and pattern. In her hands, the Black woman is both a bright and polished Ebony ideal and a picture of womanist yearning.”

Making yourself an object is a way of objecting to being made into anything by anyone else, and such an objection suggests the desire for something more than the Ebony ideal or a lipstick-inspired layer of masking. But while yearning can certainly be expressed by bright, polished, posed, rhinestoned masks, can it be met? My favorite line in Bessie Smith’s song is “Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.” Thomas’s figures are always fixed up but intentionally stationary. They’re captive to their personae, but that’s why you create a persona in the first place: so that you can stay inside of it.

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