5 things to know about Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Known for her large-scale portraits of Black women at repose, Thomas’ art spans painting, collage, photography, video and installation.

But whatever the medium, as the title of this 2025 Hayward Gallery exhibition – Mickalene Thomas: All About Love – infers, Thomas’ art is really all about love. Her portraits engage viewers with an arresting sense of intimacy and affection, and each of her vibrant artworks thoughtfully reshape notions of beauty, sexuality and femininity, expanding the ways in which we picture the many forms that love can take. 

As we celebrated two decades of Thomas at the Hayward Gallery from February to May 2025, we also shared these five things to know about the artist, her inspirations and her influences.

Mickalene Thomas’ portraits combine boldness and vulnerability

Mickalene Thomas’s art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood. Central to her work, and this exhibition, are spectacular mixed-media paintings depicting Black women from the artist’s circle of friends, family, girlfriends and models. Thomas says of her models, ‘they embrace their unique beauty, confidently, exuding both strength and tender vulnerability’.

The exhibition’s title All About Love is a loving homage to the feminist writer bell hooks whose book of the same name broadens the concept of love beyond romantic relationships to incorporate family, friendship, community and self-love.

Thomas talks back to the older masters of painting

Thomas’ art is in dialogue with some of the most famous artists in Western art history such as Romare Bearden, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso. The history of art is dominated by male artists who created work for male patrons and viewers. Thomas subverts this tradition, creating space for Black women to take centre stage in her grandly-scaled portraits. She models her figures on the archetypal poses of art history as a way to claim agency for women who have historically been presented as objects of desire, or excluded altogether.

Thomas’ art puts unusual materials to ingenious uses

Rhinestones, glitter and strikingly patterned fabrics have become hallmarks of Thomas’ work, posing a challenge to conventional ideas of painting. The artist recalls how this unique aspect of her work emerged when she was a student in New York: ‘I couldn’t afford oil paint. I would rummage often through the recycled stretcher bins and gather my materials from that. All I could afford was craft materials, like felt and different fabrics and glitter.’ 

It was whilst she was a student that Thomas also first saw the work of British artists like Chris Ofili and Tracey Emin on display, as part of the travelling Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The eclectic and unconventional materials used by these artists – from elephant dung to a canvas tent – gave Thomas confidence in her own developing style.

Thomas’ artistic process starts with photography

As a young artist, Thomas embraced portrait photography and began building elaborate sets in her studio for her models to occupy, a practice which she continues to this day. She wanted her subjects to feel at home in environments of ease and elegance.

Citing the influence of Malian photographer Seydou Keïta, Thomas creates backdrops from draped textiles and decorative wall treatments as well as furniture and other props. Early in her practice, Thomas used these photographs as material for her collages and paintings, but over time, the artist has embraced her photographs as artworks in their own right.

Thomas’ art is steeped in memory

Thomas’s artworks are a kaleidoscope of boldly patterned textiles, prints, wood panelling, and floral wallpaper evocative of her childhood in New Jersey. And for this exhibition, Thomas recreates two entire living room spaces from her past. ‘I imagine the spaces from earlier in my life’ the artist explains, ‘my grandmother’s house, my aunt’s house, my uncle’s house, my mother’s house. My interiors partly reflect my nostalgia for how I lived.’ Alongside decor, Thomas’ works contain frequent references to the popular culture of the Civil Rights, Black is Beautiful, and Black Lives Matter movements. 

Thomas keeps a lyric book of soul and R&B hits, often borrowing lines for the titles for her artworks. For her film work Angelitos Negros (2016) Thomas was inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song in which the singer implores artists to paint Black angels in their religious paintings. For Thomas, the song was a revelation, speaking to the heart of her mission to create celebratory and joyful images of Black women.

Image in header: Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher, (2009). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery.