The Sisterhood of Mickalene Thomas: Create the Right Context, Then Focus and Celebrate

Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of work by the African American artist Mickalene Thomas. (‘All About Love’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 5 May.)

‘With painting you can manipulate time, shaping how it’s perceived. It’s about exploring fantasy, illusion and the creation of desire.’
Mickalene Thomas

Thomas creates paintings, photographs, collages and installations that celebrate her family, friends and lovers. Her portraits are big, bold, colourful and confident. Conveying a very human presence with intimacy and intensity, they stop us in our tracks, hold us in their gaze.

‘To see yourself, and for others to see you, is a form of validation. I’m interested in that very mysterious and mystical way we relate to each other in the world.’

Born in 1971, in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas was raised by her mother, a former fashion model, who enrolled her in after-school art lessons at the Newark Museum. 

‘It all began as a young child, when I recognised beauty and desire by the way the world responded to my mother’s beauty. My understanding of the complexity of desire began with how I perceived myself in relation to my mother. I became mindful of a desire to be the woman that she hoped I would be.’

As a teenager, Thomas moved to Portland, Oregon, and she subsequently studied at the Pratt Institute and Yale School of Art. She developed a particular interest in creating large-scale depictions of Black women. 

‘I grew up with a lot of brothers, and I don’t have any sisters, so for me it’s really important to develop my sisterhood. It’s something I’ve always coveted.’

Painting in oil, acrylic and enamel, sometimes employing collaged black and white photos to add a touch of realism, Thomas inlays her work with multi-coloured rhinestones. Her subjects, dressed in vibrant, glamorous clothes and located in bright domestic contexts, are in repose, relaxed, at leisure. They regard us directly, with assured stares, seeming both self-possessed and vulnerable.

‘The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go.’

Often the poses and compositions echo the works of historical European painters - Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Monet – as Thomas seeks to reclaim art from its traditional white male perspective.

‘My work is rooted in self-discovery, celebration, joy, sensuality, and a need to see positive images of Black women in the world.’

Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015,
Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel, 60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm)

I was impressed by Thomas’ process. 

She first photographs her subjects in bespoke sets built in her Brooklyn studio. These interiors, draped with vividly patterned textiles, suggest warmth, security, the comfort of home. 

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

At the exhibition you can see a couple of Thomas’ living room installations, recalled from her own childhood: mirror walls, thick carpet, Tiffany lamp and pot plants; Donna Summer and Diana Ross LPs leaning against the music centre. She seems to be suggesting that our identity is shaped by the spaces we inhabit, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to.

Having put her sitters at their ease, Thomas then finds deeply personal connections with them. She focuses on who they truly are, celebrates them, elevates them. 

‘Beauty has always been an element of discussion for Black women, whether or not we’re the ones having the conversation.’

In the world of commercial communication, we may recognise this approach: settle on the right environment; create an appropriate context; locate the brand in its own world. Then focus on, and amplify, its truth.

‘I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I’m Black and a woman. You don’t necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman.’

There’s much to see at the exhibition beyond Thomas’ portraiture. I was particularly taken with a video piece inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song, ‘Angelitos Negros.’ The artist reimagines original footage of Kitt singing, combining it with images of herself. The lyrics ask why religious painters of the past filled the heavens exclusively with white figures. 

It’s an absence Thomas seeks to address. She paints her own Black angels. 

'Painters painting saints in church,
How do you know that God is white?
Painter, if you paint with love,
Paint me some Black angels now.
For good Blacks in Heaven,
Painter, show us that you care.
Paint me some Black angels now.
Paint me some Black angels now.’

Eartha Kitt, 'Angelitos Negros’ (Translation) (M Maciste, A Blanco)

No. 507

‘I Made It All Up’: Bruce Springsteen and the Art of Invention

Courtesy of Rolling Stone

‘We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior.'

Bruce Springsteen, ‘Springsteen on Broadway’

I recently watched ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ (Netflix), the film record of Bruce Springsteen’s 2017-18 residency at the Walter Kerr Theatre, New York.

I’ve always been an admirer of Springsteen. As a youngster I fell for the romantic picture he painted of blue collar America. He sang about his family and friends, home and hometown; about cars and girls, escape and the open road; about dancing in the dark and racing in the streets; about broken promises, burnt out Chevrolets and the land of hope and dreams. He was a sentimental storyteller, a soulful troubadour. He was the future of rock’n’roll.

‘Springsteen on Broadway’ is not a conventional gig. The singer weaves stripped down versions of some of his more famous numbers around a spoken narrative about his life and career. For the most part he stands alone on stage, in dark jeans and t-shirt. Lean and tanned, face chiseled, eyes beaming, a smile never far from his lips, he commands our attention.

He explains what his hometown, Freehold, New Jersey, meant to him when he was growing up.

‘There was a place here. You could hear it, you could smell it. A place where people made lives, and where they worked and where they danced, and where they enjoyed small pleasures and played baseball, and suffered pain; where they had their hearts broken and where they made love, had kids; where they died and drank themselves drunk on spring nights; and where they did their very best, the best they could to hold off the demons outside and inside that sought to destroy them and their homes and their families and their town.' 

Springsteen speaks with a preacher’s zeal, testifying to the ties that bind. He prompts us to recall why we loved the United States in the first place; reaffirms the fundamental dignity of the working class; reminds us that masculinity doesn’t have to be toxic; restores our faith in the transformative power of rock’n’roll music.

‘The joyful, life-affirming, hip-shaking, ass-quaking, guitar-playing, mind and heart-changing, race-challenging, soul-lifting bliss of a freer existence… All you had to do to get a taste of it was to risk being your true self.’

Springsteen’s emotive themes resonate particularly in a contemporary setting, when there’s so much doubt about America and its place in the world – when there’s a darkness on the edge of town.

‘These days some reminding of who we are and who we can be isn’t such a bad thing.’

There’s a compelling moment early in the show when Springsteen comes clean about the source of his classic blue collar narratives.

'I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud. So am I … I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life. I've never done any hard labor. I've never worked nine to five… I’ve never seen the inside of a factory and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about. Standing before you is a man who has become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something of which he has had absolutely no personal experience. I made it all up.'

Though Springsteen had little first hand experience of working class struggle, it becomes clear, nonetheless, that his storytelling gift was rooted in observation of the community he grew up in, awareness of its strengths and passions, sensitivity to its trials and tribulations. Moreover, many of his songs were inspired by his father - ‘my hero and my greatest foe’ - a complex man of Dutch Irish descent, who was haunted by depression and drink and struggled to find work.

‘Now those whose love we wanted but didn’t get, we emulate them. It’s the only way we have in our power to get the closeness and the love that we needed and desired.’

It is conventional to characterize composers and storytellers as lonely, isolated souls, as outsiders struggling to articulate their unique personal vision and experience. Springsteen’s narrative, by contrast, expresses an intense sense of belonging - to family, community and country – harnessed to acute observational skills. He has profound empathy and emotional intelligence. He feels for other people. And this equips him to tell their stories.

Springsteen should prompt all of us working in creative industries to interrogate our own roots, background and community: How have my history and culture made me? How have I been influenced by my parents and siblings? How am I a product of my hometown?

When confronted by a taxing brief or a blank sheet of paper, when struggling for a creative spark, the inspiration may be close to home.

'I met her on the strip three years ago
In a Camaro with this dude from LA.
I blew that Camaro off my back and drove that little girl away.
But now there's wrinkles around my baby's eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night.
When I come home the house is dark,
She sighs "Baby did you make it all right."

Tonight, tonight the highway's bright,
Out of our way mister you best keep.
'Cause summer's here and the time is right
For racing in the street.'

Bruce Springsteen,’Racing in the Streets’

No. 215