One Fine Show: ‘Mickalene Thomas, All About Love’ at the Barnes Foundation

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The art world always returns from Miami with a sense that the temperature has been taken. We know who is up, who is down and where the market is. This year we learned that the long-prophesied “Trump Bump” for sales remains somewhat hypothetical, perhaps even mythological. We learned that everyone seems to have forgiven Kehinde Wiley. And if you took a casual spin through the fair or attended Cultured magazine’s big bash in the Design District, you could confirm what many already suspected: Mickalene Thomas remains very popular.

Her hotly anticipated international survey, “All About Love,” has just landed on the East Coast at the Barnes Foundation, with around fifty works from two decades of her career, offering a focused look at her practice that still offers compelling dialogues with the works by Monet, Picasso and Courbet in the Barnes collection.

One of the things that Thomas has in common with Wiley is that while she is known for updating the work of these classic-feeling artists, she doesn’t haul them into the contemporary extreme. She is, like Wiley, someone who was born in the 1970s, and like Wiley, her vision of what is modern is still vintage. The oldest works in this show come from her Brawlin Spitfire series, which depicts women in leopard prints doing pro wrestling moves on each other in a suggestive way. 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 all these tableaux and rhinestones, which is the point. Her most famous work Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010) of course features Afros and is described in the catalogue as “cutting through the gendered chrono fabric of the present to evoke the warm horizons of myriad possible futures.” Perhaps, but gazing at it for an extended period one can’t help but notice just how much past there is in it. Her herbaceous background is reminiscent of the patches found in Neo-Expressionism, the blocks of color almost like Ellsworth Kelly’s. There’s a bit of Cubism, there’s a bit of collage, there’s really a bit of everything.

None of this is jarring. In fact, this work probably resonates with so many people because of how inviting it is. Afro Goddess Looking Forward (2015) has all the ingredients of a work that might become off-putting, with its forward-facing, real human eyes and blouse that continues across the body inconsistently. 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 minority lesbian experience.

Among the more recent works in the show is the Warholian Noir est beau (Joséphine Baker 3), which was created for Dior’s 2023 couture runway. It’s a bit colder, which maybe speaks to the demands of fashion. Or perhaps that’s a message that Thomas should imbibe from this year’s Miami fairs: big and glossy feel all wrong these days.

“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” is on view at the Barnes Foundation through January 12, 2025.