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Mickalene Thomas Doesn’t Need the Whitney Biennial
In conversation with an artist who has always claimed her own spaces.
Born in Camden, New Jersey, and based in Brooklyn, this 54-year-old artist grabs our attention with glorious portraits of Black women that incorporate a dizzying mix of cultural-historical references, from Cubism and Matisse to Pam Grier and Carrie Mae Weems. Most famously, the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 commissioned a painting from Thomas tilted Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, a play on the Manet work that shocked 19th-century audiences with its depiction of a nude female lounging with two fully dressed gentlemen in a forest. “It’s about Black women claiming a space,” she told me in a conversation last February at the New York Academy of Art, which is reproduced here, edited and condensed for clarity, ahead of the closing of Thomas’s retrospective at the Barnes in Philadelphia.
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