Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971)
Tamika sur une chaise longue, 2008
Chromogenic print, edition 1 of 5
Purchase, Advisory Council for Photography
2011.20
In Tamika sur une chaise longue (2008), Mickalene Thomas simultaneously creates and destroys. As the artist puts it, she begins by constructing an entire stage for her and her model to perform a dance. Photographer and model create an image of pride for Black womanhood, together projecting expressions of Black femininity and sexuality through patterned textiles, confident posing, and a powerful gaze. After defiantly “owning and claiming” the photograph as a kind of stage, Thomas used this image as the source for a later painting.
But by constructing an entire space and method of photographic development traditionally wielded by White photographers in commercial endeavors, Thomas also enacts a process of destruction. Her work effectively dismantles historical conventions of Western art, and photography in particular, that served to render Black bodies as objects stripped of agency. She represents her sitter in a pose that recalls the nineteenth-century, European orientalist trope, the odalisque. The odalisque is a reclining nude pose White men painters employed to depict colonized women as sexual objects. Thomas redirects the exploitative, “othering,” White male gaze meant to constrict and objectify Black sexuality toward her own self-possession as a queer, Black woman. Her model’s gaze is proud and loving, rather than meek or exotified, celebrating the complexities and multitudes of Black female sexuality. She thus centers and uplifts a Black, female, queer gaze and Black beauty by repurposing a familiar trope Western art historical trope and the camera as sources of reclamation, resistance, and sexual decolonization.
Andrew Handrea, Loeb Curatorial Research Intern, Summer 2020
Further Reading:
- Derek Conrad Murray, “Mickalene Thomas: Afro-Kitsch and the Queering of Blackness,” American Art , Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2014).
- Kara Walker, “Artists on Artists: Mickalene Thomas,” BOMB, Spring 2009, No. 107 (Spring, 2009).
- Margo Natalie Crawford, “The Satire of Black Post-Blackness,” The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (University of Illinois Press, 2017).
- Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?” Art in America (September 1990).
- Mickalene Thomas and Sean Landers, “Mickalene Thomas,” BOMB No. 116 (Summer 2011).
