Welcome to One Fine Show, where The Observer highlights a recent exhibition at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love that has received widespread attention.
The art world always comes back from Miami with a sense that it has cooled down. We know who’s up, who’s down, and where the market is. This year we learned that the long-predicted “Trump surge” in sales remains somewhat hypothetical, perhaps even a myth. We learn that everyone seems to have forgiven Kehinde Wiley. If you wandered around the show or attended Cultured magazine’s gala in the Design District, you could confirm what many already suspected: Mickalene Thomas is still popular.
Her much-anticipated international survey All About Love has just landed on the East Coast at the Barnes Foundation, which features some fifty works from her twenty-year career, focusing on her practice while still Offers a compelling dialogue with works by Monet, Picasso, and Courbet from the Barnes Collection.
One thing Thomas has in common with Wiley is that while she is known for updating the work of these classically feeling artists, she did not push them to contemporary extremes. Like Wiley, she was born in the 1970s, but like Wiley, her view of modernity is still retro. The oldest works in this exhibition are by her Brolin Spitfire series, depicting women in leopard print performing professional wrestling moves on each other in a suggestive manner. The ’80s vibe belies the fact that they were made in the early 2000s.
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It’s hard to see time through these scenes and rhinestones, and that’s the point. her most famous work Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Three Black Women (2010) features an afro, of course, and is described in the catalog as “breaking through the gendered timing structures of the present, evoking a warm horizon of countless possible futures.” Maybe, but stare at it long enough and one can’t help but notice the How much has passed. Her herbal backgrounds are reminiscent of the patches found in Neo-Expressionism, with blocks of color almost like those of Ellsworth Kelly. A little bit of cubism, a little bit of collage, really a little bit of everything.
There is nothing jarring about any of this. In fact, this work probably resonates with many people because of its appeal. African goddess looks to the future (2015) has all the elements of a potentially offensive work, with its forward-facing, realistic human eyes and a shirt that continues inconsistently on the body. Instead, it’s all just comfortable and familiar, like hanging out in your parents’ basement, even if your past has little in common with the experiences of a handful of lesbians.
The latest works in the exhibition include the Warholian black is beauty (Joséphine Baker 3), created for the Dior Haute Couture 2023 show. The weather is a bit cold, which may be in line with fashion. Perhaps Thomas should take a message from this year’s Miami Expo: Big and flashy just doesn’t feel right these days.
“Mikalyn Thomas: All About Love” will be on display at the Barnes Foundation through January 12, 2025.
