Artist
Mickalene Thomas
Via New York, NY, USA
Mickalene Thomas is a distinguished, multidisciplinary visual artist and filmmaker who deftly combines art-historical, political and pop-cultural references to create a striking commentary on what it means to be a woman in the 21st century by challenging conventional notions of beauty. Her work across various mediums is informed by her deep engagement with art history and classical genres of portraiture, landscape and still life, which she re-contextualizes in contemporary terms.
Thomas earned her MFA from Yale University in 2002, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000. She has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including her recent solo exhibition "Origin of the Universe," which originated at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, where her film, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, premiered. Thomas has also been featured on MTV’s Art Breaks video series, curated by MoMA PS1 and Creative Time. Her work has been featured in various catalogues and been reviewed by ArtForum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, NY Arts, Modern Painters and Whitewall, among others. In 2002-2003, she participated in the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2011 she was a resident at the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program in Giverny, France. Her awards include Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2012), Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award (2012), Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts (2012), Joan Mitchell Grant and the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award (2009), and the Rema Hort Mann Grant (2007). Thomas’s work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Rubell Collection, Miami, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Mickalene Thomas is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York and Hong Kong, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in California, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia in France. She was born in 1971 in New Jersey.
