A lot of times when you think of what Black artists should be making, it's never about everyday life. It's never about how we're living or experiencing the joy or environment. We're responsible to provide the world and insight to who we are based on our image, not based on our life, our lived experiences.
Mickalene Thomas
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A figure is lost to history in a rare landscape work by Mickalene Thomas.
In Landscape With Woman Washing Her Feet, Mickalene brings her voice to Nicolas Poussin’s eponymous painting from 1650. The artist became enamoured by the romantic style of the Hudson River School painters after frequent travels to upstate New York in 2008. Using photographs taken during this time, she pieces together the idyllic scene – but the titular woman is absent. A flash of glittering animal print offers a clue at who she might have been.
Landscape With Woman Washing Her Feet shows Mickalene experimenting outside of the bounds of her usual practice. She challenges both the expectations of black art and of landscape painting – using unexpected materials like rhinestones to blur the lines between nature and artifice. Printmakers utilised metallic shimmers, and gloss detailing to replicate the dynamic light and textures of the original.
Mickalene Thomas10 collaborationsMickalene Thomas set out to change the face of art history, and that's exactly what she did. In her loud but tender multimedia portraits, Black femme power, beauty and desire take centre stage. Whether it's the artist herself, her mother, a lover, a friend or a public figure like Michelle Obama, each woman tells her own story. In Thomas' words: "The gaze of my work is unapologetically a Black woman's gaze loving other Black women."¹ This deep sense of adoration and respect comes through in all of her art – not just her portraits but her interiors and photography too. The bright Pop Art-esque blend of photography, collage, paint and craft shop materials like rhinestones has a celebratory feel designed to uplift and empower the next generation. "For me, it's all about trying to inspire and make young girls, when they walk into a space like [a museum], feel a sense of themselves. They see that they're represented."
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