“Love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong. I’m a seeker on a path... a path about love.” So fully in sync with that premise, Mickalene Thomas embraced the title of bell hooks’ dynamic words for her first internationally touring exhibition, All About Love, showing at The Broad through September 29, 2024. I spoke with curator Ed Schad about a truly vigorous invitation from Thomas to meet her women and become enveloped in a passage of portraits, collage, photography, rhinestones, and Love.
Gwynned Vitello: Let’s start by telling me how you got involved with this show.
Ed Schad: The show was initially pitched to Mickalene by the Hayward in London, and their director approached ours about it. I then took a meeting in London with Chief Curator Rachel Thomas, who had opened the conversation with Mickalene, and yeah, I’ve been on the project ever since.
It’s described as a touring exhibition, so would you describe it as a retrospective? I hope we see Lounging, Standing, Looking in the show.
There hasn’t been an international touring exhibition. This show focuses on 20 years of Mickaelene’s work, and you do get your wish. Lounging, Standing Looking, from 2003, is her earliest work in the show, and there will also be pieces that are fresh out of the studio from 2024. So we have this wonderful arc from her career dating back to her postgraduate period right up to what’s happening day to day right now.
That’s great! Following up on how things began, I do wonder about the title of the show. When the idea was presented and you were all talking about it, was bell hooks part of the conversation, or did that come up later?
It came a little bit later. The show developed over many months, and the title was something Mickalene suggested, and I’m thrilled by the title, thrilled that we’re centering on bell hooks’ book. I’ve used that book quite often for my essay as to how we aim to present the spirit of the work.
I think it’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year, so I had to look up some excerpts and discovered that it’s a small book, but full of beautiful sensibility, perfect for this exhibition.
It definitely is. In my reading of the book, I think the chapter I’ve personally engaged with most is called the “Love Ethic.” I think that one of bell hooks’ arguments about love in that chapter is that the true engagement that love requires, which is often joyful (but always a task) is something that has to be recommitted over and over again. So Mickalene and how she approached her subject, whether it’s her mother Sandra or a muse like Din or Qusuquzah, it’s a level of engagement over the course of many years, even decades. As she returns to their images and repeats them, I really keyed on an expression the bell used about the ethic of love moving from state to state. It’s almost like printmaking, and I think that beautifully encapsulates the spirit of what Mickalene does as she moves a muse from making them feel comfortable in an environment into a photograph, into a collage, into a painting. And now, with recent works into a variety of mediums, whether silkscreen or dye sublimation print or neon or sculpture, it’s a matter of renewed engagement, renewed looking at people she cares deeply about. This is a bit wordy, but I think that’s the spirit. I fully expect the other partners to come up with their own interpretation of how the title intersects with Mickalene, but that’s the approach that I wanted to take.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/7177761077.jpg]
Oh, I think the title is so important to this show: All About Love. It imbues all the work and you’ve expressed it really well. I hope quotes from the book are in your essay and the wall texts.
My essay references bell hooks, for sure and I expect it to enter the wall text, which I’m writing now.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/0771761770.jpg]
Let’s circle back to the work and your connection with this show.
I don’t think Mickalene remembers, but I did a studio visit with her 15 years ago. I loved her work, and I loved her. Afterwards, I saw her show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2012. I remember it vividly and reference it in the floor plan at the Broad. Then MOCA did a small show, referenced in the show, in 2016 called Do I Look Like a Lady?. So over time, I got to know her work.
Tell me about the show.
It begins, as I think a Mickalene Thomas show should, with her relationship with her mother in Camden, New Jersey, with interiors from both the home in the 1970s as well as a tableau showing Sandra’s home a bit later in the 80s, two different periods of her mother’s life. We are partially recreating an installation in Los Angeles, an early body of work called The Wrestlers. So the show opens with those immersive environments.
Mickalene is such a dynamic creator of environments, whether it's the interiors of her mother’s life and celebrations and parties when she was growing up or really overt moments that reference Black culture, say, through the auspices of Jet Magazine. Those are far beyond discreet collages and paintings. They are environments, and she approaches every show that way. So we’ve tried to build the broad installation as a collection of the genius in regards to installation and built environments. We want people to feel comfortable and at ease, to feel invited. Everything that we’re doing involves taking those moments of Black joy as expressed through a publication like Jet and expressed through her muses, whether that’s her other, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, or the movie The Color Purple. Those touchstones will be present in the installation to evoke the senses of love, community, joy, and struggle—that’s what we’re trying to do.
I immediately experience joy and welcome (and more joy) when I look at the work. There’s more to learn and experience in her art, but I don’t feel a barrier.
I think that is one of the powerful lenses that Mickalene brings to the table. So often we’re at this vantage point where we feel at a disadvantage towards culture. Wherever that’s coming from, whether art history or museums as imposing places, or expectations of culture of how we get involved, we can often feel that culture is looking at us rather than the other way around. Mickalene’s strength and dynamism are that she allows herself to look at someone like Picasso, Courbet, or Monet, fully secure in her identity as a queer black woman coming from Camden, New Jersey, and that is an empowered position that is not taken for granted.
She doesn’t assume, like culture often does, that we should approach a figure like Picasso and value that just because he’s Picasso. We engage with him and determine our own value according to where we are standing. It’s not a requirement, and so those women she loves, she puts into the poses of Courbet or Delacroix. It’s a critical position, and that critical position is a struggle. Later in Mickalene’s work, with the emergence of a body of work called the Resist series, the struggle is more overt. There she uses that political position that Picasso took as a way of looking at the murder of Black individuals at the hands of the police, the history of incarceration, and the suppression of uprising and revolution.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/1710016177.jpg]
From my point of view, you can’t think about Mickalene Thomas fully without the Resist work, without these moments where she turns a resistant critical lens at someone like Picasso or even Jet magazine, this conduit of Black culture, an extraordinary register of the Civil Rights movement. But it also had a pin-up calendar and took a position that can be examined on aesthetics, on what beauty is and who is chosen as beautiful, which, from a certain point of view, was something oriented towards the male gaze. Men are looking with desire at women. What does that mean when Mickalene, as a queer black woman, turns her desire, embracing her desire for the Jet beauties of the week, and approaches those women from her point of view, thinking about sexuality through that lens? It’s a very dynamic practice.
She’s inviting us to do the same—to view moments in our own lives, from our own positions, through her paintings?
...
Gwynned Vitello: Let’s start by telling me how you got involved with this show.
Ed Schad: The show was initially pitched to Mickalene by the Hayward in London, and their director approached ours about it. I then took a meeting in London with Chief Curator Rachel Thomas, who had opened the conversation with Mickalene, and yeah, I’ve been on the project ever since.
It’s described as a touring exhibition, so would you describe it as a retrospective? I hope we see Lounging, Standing, Looking in the show.
There hasn’t been an international touring exhibition. This show focuses on 20 years of Mickaelene’s work, and you do get your wish. Lounging, Standing Looking, from 2003, is her earliest work in the show, and there will also be pieces that are fresh out of the studio from 2024. So we have this wonderful arc from her career dating back to her postgraduate period right up to what’s happening day to day right now.
That’s great! Following up on how things began, I do wonder about the title of the show. When the idea was presented and you were all talking about it, was bell hooks part of the conversation, or did that come up later?
It came a little bit later. The show developed over many months, and the title was something Mickalene suggested, and I’m thrilled by the title, thrilled that we’re centering on bell hooks’ book. I’ve used that book quite often for my essay as to how we aim to present the spirit of the work.
I think it’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year, so I had to look up some excerpts and discovered that it’s a small book, but full of beautiful sensibility, perfect for this exhibition.
It definitely is. In my reading of the book, I think the chapter I’ve personally engaged with most is called the “Love Ethic.” I think that one of bell hooks’ arguments about love in that chapter is that the true engagement that love requires, which is often joyful (but always a task) is something that has to be recommitted over and over again. So Mickalene and how she approached her subject, whether it’s her mother Sandra or a muse like Din or Qusuquzah, it’s a level of engagement over the course of many years, even decades. As she returns to their images and repeats them, I really keyed on an expression the bell used about the ethic of love moving from state to state. It’s almost like printmaking, and I think that beautifully encapsulates the spirit of what Mickalene does as she moves a muse from making them feel comfortable in an environment into a photograph, into a collage, into a painting. And now, with recent works into a variety of mediums, whether silkscreen or dye sublimation print or neon or sculpture, it’s a matter of renewed engagement, renewed looking at people she cares deeply about. This is a bit wordy, but I think that’s the spirit. I fully expect the other partners to come up with their own interpretation of how the title intersects with Mickalene, but that’s the approach that I wanted to take.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/7177761077.jpg]
Oh, I think the title is so important to this show: All About Love. It imbues all the work and you’ve expressed it really well. I hope quotes from the book are in your essay and the wall texts.
My essay references bell hooks, for sure and I expect it to enter the wall text, which I’m writing now.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/0771761770.jpg]
Let’s circle back to the work and your connection with this show.
I don’t think Mickalene remembers, but I did a studio visit with her 15 years ago. I loved her work, and I loved her. Afterwards, I saw her show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2012. I remember it vividly and reference it in the floor plan at the Broad. Then MOCA did a small show, referenced in the show, in 2016 called Do I Look Like a Lady?. So over time, I got to know her work.
Tell me about the show.
It begins, as I think a Mickalene Thomas show should, with her relationship with her mother in Camden, New Jersey, with interiors from both the home in the 1970s as well as a tableau showing Sandra’s home a bit later in the 80s, two different periods of her mother’s life. We are partially recreating an installation in Los Angeles, an early body of work called The Wrestlers. So the show opens with those immersive environments.
Mickalene is such a dynamic creator of environments, whether it's the interiors of her mother’s life and celebrations and parties when she was growing up or really overt moments that reference Black culture, say, through the auspices of Jet Magazine. Those are far beyond discreet collages and paintings. They are environments, and she approaches every show that way. So we’ve tried to build the broad installation as a collection of the genius in regards to installation and built environments. We want people to feel comfortable and at ease, to feel invited. Everything that we’re doing involves taking those moments of Black joy as expressed through a publication like Jet and expressed through her muses, whether that’s her other, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, or the movie The Color Purple. Those touchstones will be present in the installation to evoke the senses of love, community, joy, and struggle—that’s what we’re trying to do.
I immediately experience joy and welcome (and more joy) when I look at the work. There’s more to learn and experience in her art, but I don’t feel a barrier.
I think that is one of the powerful lenses that Mickalene brings to the table. So often we’re at this vantage point where we feel at a disadvantage towards culture. Wherever that’s coming from, whether art history or museums as imposing places, or expectations of culture of how we get involved, we can often feel that culture is looking at us rather than the other way around. Mickalene’s strength and dynamism are that she allows herself to look at someone like Picasso, Courbet, or Monet, fully secure in her identity as a queer black woman coming from Camden, New Jersey, and that is an empowered position that is not taken for granted.
She doesn’t assume, like culture often does, that we should approach a figure like Picasso and value that just because he’s Picasso. We engage with him and determine our own value according to where we are standing. It’s not a requirement, and so those women she loves, she puts into the poses of Courbet or Delacroix. It’s a critical position, and that critical position is a struggle. Later in Mickalene’s work, with the emergence of a body of work called the Resist series, the struggle is more overt. There she uses that political position that Picasso took as a way of looking at the murder of Black individuals at the hands of the police, the history of incarceration, and the suppression of uprising and revolution.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/icJoyKeMO1716205999095/1710016177.jpg]
From my point of view, you can’t think about Mickalene Thomas fully without the Resist work, without these moments where she turns a resistant critical lens at someone like Picasso or even Jet magazine, this conduit of Black culture, an extraordinary register of the Civil Rights movement. But it also had a pin-up calendar and took a position that can be examined on aesthetics, on what beauty is and who is chosen as beautiful, which, from a certain point of view, was something oriented towards the male gaze. Men are looking with desire at women. What does that mean when Mickalene, as a queer black woman, turns her desire, embracing her desire for the Jet beauties of the week, and approaches those women from her point of view, thinking about sexuality through that lens? It’s a very dynamic practice.
She’s inviting us to do the same—to view moments in our own lives, from our own positions, through her paintings?
...
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Juxtapoz (Digital) - 1 Issue, Summer 2024