LONDON.- The Hayward Gallery will present Mickalene Thomas: All About Love as the pioneering artist’s first solo presentation in a UK public art gallery from 11 February to 5 May 2025. Thomas is a trailblazer of portraiture and collage, widely renowned for her large scale paintings of Black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds embellished with rhinestones. As an artist who fearlessly transcends creative boundaries, her artworks have also adorned album covers (Solange’s EP True, 2013) and emblazoned fashion runways (Dior, 2023).


Immerse yourself in Thomas’s vibrant collages—get these must-read monographs on Mickalene Thomas for an in-depth look at her creative process and influences.


Thomas has redefined beauty and identity through her vibrant and dynamic compositions. Her work, characterised by a unique blend of colour, pattern, and subject matter, challenges societal norms and provides a powerful counter-narrative to mainstream depictions of beauty and identity.

The exhibition’s title, All About Love, reflects the artist’s expansive and empowering definition of the term love - encompassing family love, self-love and romantic love. On this, Thomas says: ‘my gaze is the gaze of a Black woman unapologetically loving other Black women’. Throughout her work, Thomas draws on the tenets of Black feminist theory in writing by authors and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Collins and bell hooks, to whose internationally acclaimed 2000 book All About Love: New Visions the exhibition title pays homage.

All About Love will showcase Thomas’s extensive practice across painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. Visitors will be introduced to Thomas’s unique visual language developed in work across the last two decades. They will experience her myriad influences, ranging from 19th-century European ‘masters’ like Courbet, Ingres, Manet and Monet, to the fashion and interior design of 1970s America to present day social political events.

At the heart of the exhibition are Thomas’s spectacular mixed-media paintings - grandly scaled and embellished with rhinestones in the artist’s signature style - depicting Black women from the artist’s circle of friends, family, lovers and models. These works centre on repose, rest and leisure which, in Thomas’s handling, are shown to be radical acts. The exhibition will also showcase Thomas’s distinctive tableaux installations which transport viewers into domestic settings of the artist’s 1970s and 1980s childhood, creating an affecting homage to the artist’s mother, her first and most abiding muse.

Thomas creates celebratory and affirming images of Black women, whilst critically examining the history of Black and female representation within the Western art canon. The exhibition will show how Thomas has redefined contemporary portraiture, using pattern, colour and glittering ornamentation to imbue her sitters with beauty, glamour and style. In this way, All About Love will expand audiences’ understanding of what turns a portrait into a vivid, profound and powerful work of art.

Mickalene Thomas is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon.

Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Award nominated co-producer, curator, educator, and mentor to many emerging artists. Apart from her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums and collaborates with corporations and luxury brands. In 2023, she became the first Black femme artist to have a scholarship in her name at the Yale School of Art. She has also been the recipient of numerous prizes, grants, and honours including Gordon Parks Foundation (2024), LA LGBT’s 2024 Vanguard Award, the Creative Capital Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact Award (2024); Hirshhorn Artist x Artist New York Gala honoree (2023); the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Appraisers Association of America, Award for Excellence in the Arts, (2019); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019). In 2018, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art and, in 2015, she was a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow. Thomas is also the Co-Founder of SOULAS House, a cultural hub and retreat for Black women, Co-Founder in Sock Factory Arts, the Co-Founder of Pratt>FORWARD and founder of Art>FORWARD Artist in the Market incubator for post graduate students.

Work by Thomas is in the collections of numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles among others. Thomas serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum, A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and The Last Resort.

In May 2024, the touring exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love opened at The Broad. Co-organised by the Hayward Gallery, London and The Broad and in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia and les Abbatoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse. Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour of Thomas’ work. The show marked its debut at The Broad with over 80 works by the artist over the last 20 years.



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