ASPEN, CO.- As the Aspen Art Museum’s 2015–16 Gabriela and Ramiro Garza Distinguished Artist in Residence, New York–based Mickalene Thomas has developed a new body of work in film, video, and photography entitled Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities and curated by AAM Curator Courtenay Finn. Focusing on the roles that mentors, muses, and celebrities play in her own life, Thomas uses the copy-and-paste sensibility of her paintings and collages to edit together portraits of women with her own image, creating a larger narrative of what it means to be a woman in the world today.

The new work builds on Thomas’s previous research by considering who we look up to, who inspires us, who we find in the world at large, as well as who we feel represents us, looks like us, and shows us what we could be or want. The women in the AAM show, who span visual culture from film, theater, music, comedy, and literature, are collaged together to show a larger gender and cultural portrait. By collaging women who inspire her that she does not know along with women present in her life, the exhibition is also a portrait of Thomas’s private world, showing the artist alongside her own muses, mentors, and celebrities.

The exhibition also offers a platform for larger discussions about social justice and topical issues faced by women today. Concentrating on how women are specifically affected, Thomas will host a community lunch with Nancy and Bob Magoon AAM CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman inviting Roaring Fork Valley–based thought leaders in domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide prevention to the museum.

“Women have long seen themselves represented in art and media by male creators,” said Nancy and Bob Magoon AAM CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman. “Mickalene creates empowering images of women—almost exclusively women of color—that allow diverse perspectives on beauty, self, and the other to be seen.”

Mickalene Thomas has been included in numerous important solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012–13) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2012); Mickalene Thomas, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012); Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2011); and 30 Americans, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC (2011). Her work is part of significant public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.