The History of Disability in Art - Bowdoin College Museum of Art

The History of Disability in Art

Mickalene Thomas

American (Camden, New Jersey, 1971)

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary multi-media artist, most known for her painting collages that use materials such as rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Her art portrays staged and collaged portraits, natural environments, and interiors, examining the ways in which identities are informed by creative mediums and cultural imagery. Her work defines feminine spaces beyond conformity, pushing the boundary of what is both abstract and real, and what is, or rather who is, object and subject. She received her B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute and then her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art. Thomas’s work uses photography, video, and installation work to reflect on art history and popular culture to create a new gaze of female beauty, power, and sexuality. Carrie Mae Weems’s work, most specifically the Kitchen Table Series, has been influential to Thomas. In 2012 Thomas made a short film called, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother. The film documented Mickalene and her mother’s relationship, as her mother dealt with drug addiction and Mickalene, her sexuality.

Tell Me What You’re Thinking, 2016

MICKALENE THOMAS (American, born 1971), Tell Me What You’re Thinking, 2016, chromogenic print on paper, 39 3/4 x 49 1/2 in. (100.97 x 125.73 cm), Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, 2018.8. © 2021 Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971)

chromogenic print on paper

39 3/4 x 49 1/2 in. (100.97 x 125.73 cm)

Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, 2018.8. © 2021 Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Tell Me What You’re Thinking references the paintings of male artists such as Titian, Manet, and Matisse, white European male artists who frequently placed women in suggestive postures within exotic settings. Mickalene Thomas consistently complicates this history and reconfigures the relationship between artist, model, and viewer.  In this photograph, the central figure, a model with whom she works frequently, reclines in a flowered dress in an odalisque posture amidst a sea of brightly colored and exuberantly patterned fabrics. Staring directly at the viewer, the model exudes confidence and commands attention.  Thomas’s work also draws influence from the fashion, film, music, and television culture of her youth in the 1970s and 1980s. This evocation of the past liberates the composition from the present moment and allows it to engage in meaningful ways with larger questions about the changing representations of Black women in art from past and present.

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine

Bowdoin College Museum of Art