“I think every artist would like to be a rock star.” – Robert Ayers in conversation with Mickalene Thomas.
Mickalene Thomas
No one walking along West 53rd Street on the way to MoMA this summer can miss Mickalene Thomas’s remarkable installation Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires in the window of The Modern restaurant. What may come as a surprise to many MoMA visitors though, are the direct links that exist between her installation and the current Matisse show. She discusses them here and they prove utterly fascinating.
Mickalene Thomas, "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires" (2009)
Since graduating her painting MFA from Yale in 2002 Mickalene Thomas has established herself among the most engaging individuals in contemporary art, at once intelligent and provocative. And her art is among the most complex. Her subject is the black woman, her almost invisible place in the history of art, and the broad range of cultural advantages and disadvantages that she currently faces. Her subjects – who range from her close friends to professional models to media celebrities – are mostly portrayed larger than life in photographs or videos or in garish enamels and glittering rhinestones and emerge as powerful, sexual, somewhat unnerving presences, staring brazenly out of the picture.
Mickalene Thomas, "Naomi Campbell" (from "V" magazine, summer 2010)
Mickalene Thomas has enjoyed solo exhibitions at La Conservera: Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Murcia, Spain and at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Last year she had her first solo showing in New York, “She’s Come UnDone” at Lehmann Maupin, and earlier this summer she exhibited “Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl”, a solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. In the summer 2010 issue of V Magazine she portrays Naomi Campbell in Swarovski crystals, but our long and thoroughly entertaining conversation focused, to begin with at any rate, on that piece on West 53rd Street.
Mickalene, your MoMA commission Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, has been getting a lot of attention. How did it come about?
It was spearheaded by Klaus Biesenbach, who’s been a great admirer and supporter of my work. I was in the Greater New York 2005 show at P.S.1 and we first met then. He wanted to do a project with me, and so after my first solo show at Lehmann Maupin in 2009 (MoMA had just acquired a video and a painting) Klaus proposed that I do this commission in conjunction with The Modern restaurant. He really pushed me forward.
How did you feel when you heard you’d got the commission?
When I agreed to do it I wasn’t sure where the piece was going to be located until Klaus told me. So I went to have a look and I thought, “Wow! This is really challenging!” It’s a pretty large-scale window, about 12 feet by 28 feet, but I like to challenge myself, and push the boundaries with my work. It came at a time when I was working on the solo show I just had with my gallery in Los Angeles, and I had to put that show on hold just to do this project. It was quite a feat!
How did you arrive at the subject matter?
I wanted to figure out a way where it wouldn’t be just another painting, but a painting about my experience of MoMA, so I asked them if it would be possible to do something a little more site-specific. I really wanted to work from a photographic image that would be my response to MoMA, so instead of photographing the models in my studio, I wanted to photograph them at MoMA. I explored the different floors and when I was walking through the sculpture garden I saw they had the Matisse sculptures out there, and I thought that it would be a great opportunity to photograph these women looking at Matisse because he’s a great inspiration for my work.
A Sky filled with Shooting Stars » “I think every artist would like to be a rock star.” – Robert Ayers in conversation with Mickalene Thomas.
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