1Mickalene Thomas (born in 1971) works across painting, collage, photography, video, and immersive installation. Her practice is grounded in an aesthetic of assemblage and material recycling, combining rhinestones and glitter, textiles and ribbons, patterned wallpaper, furniture, and domestic decorative elements. Trained at the Pratt Institute in New York (BFA, 2000) and the Yale School of Art (MFA, 2002), Thomas revisits the canon of Western art by placing Black women at the center of compositions that draw on the conventions of the nude, portraiture, and modernist painting. Her work is deeply informed by popular culture, Black visual traditions, and the vibrant aesthetics of the 1970s, from Blaxploitation cinema to interior design and fashion photography.

2This interview was conducted at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, on January 24, 2026, after the opening of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Grand Palais, on view from December 17, 2025, to April 5, 2026. The exhibition arrived in Paris after its French debut at Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie in Toulouse (June-November 2025), and its previous international circulation in the US and in the UK, at The Broad in Los Angeles, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Hayward Gallery in London.

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Clémentine Tholas: Could you tell me about your experience in France? You took part in a residency in Giverny in 2011, which was inspired by your interest in French art. Was it the starting point of your collaboration with French institutions?

Mickalene Thomas: My first trip to Paris was when I was an undergraduate at Pratt Institute. In 1996, I took a weekend trip with a group of peers and, because it was such a short trip, it was really hard to navigate around the city. Our focus was to go to the institutions and see the art, experience being in Paris and walking around the city. We were just kids wanting to enjoy Paris. It wasn’t until many years later, in Giverny, that I was able to really immerse myself in the culture, because this time it was a four-month stay. Even if Giverny was further north, I would drive to Paris with a friend on the weekends, with the car that they had provided, and we would go to all of the different museums. Prior to coming to Paris, I was really immersed in French impressionism. I was studying a lot of Seurat as pointillism was related to my work, because I was using the rhinestones and producing dot paintings. I wanted to see the pointillist paintings in person; it became my obsession to see some of the works that I was inspired by. I needed to see these works and explore the way in which they were painted and study the visual illusion. The first time I saw the artworks of Monet, I was fascinated to discover what they really looked like. I wanted to observe the colors, the texture of the material, etc. Reproductions flatten the reality of the works and don’t render their scale. Seeing the works is crucial because you experience their physicality. Our 1996 trip was a real opportunity to finally admire pieces we had only seen in reproductions.

C.T.: How did the Musée de l’Orangerie and Cécile Debray contact you and your team for this contemporary conversation with Monet’s work?

M.T.: Cécile Debray, who is now head of the Picasso Museum in Paris, contacted my gallery and spoke to Nathalie Obadia who had explained the variety of my work, which included more than portraits or reclining figures. For instance, not many people know the body of work entitled “Tête de Femme” inspired by Picasso, and people need to discover that my practice goes far beyond the reclining sitter.

M.T.: For this Resist series, I have made 21 paintings and there could be an entire show with this work, but people are not very aware of this aspect of my practice. It is the same thing for my exploration of landscape and nature, I have produced 30 landscapes, flowers and still lifes but they are not what people remember from my work. When Nathalie Obadia and Cécile Debray were exchanging, she mentioned that I had created a whole body of work around Monet, and Cécile came to New York to discover it. There are some collages and paintings in the Monet series which are already presented in many museums around the US.

C.T.: Our perception of your work is somewhat distorted and does not reflect the diversity of your practice. However, your new show, All About Love, provides an opportunity to address this. It was first shown in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, then in London, Toulouse and now Paris. Could you tell me more about the curatorial process? Did the institutions decide which works were going to be shown, or did you decide which pieces were going to be displayed?

M.T.: The show was initiated by Cliff Lauson, who was a curator at the Hayward Gallery in London and now works at Somerset House. Rachel Thomas, who came from Ireland, continued the project after Cliff took this new job. Negotiations started before COVID happened and then the show was put on hold. When Rachel, with whom I had already worked, was hired at the Hayward Gallery, she wanted to revive this idea of a show with me. While working with her curatorially, I really wanted to include as much of my work as possible that people didn’t know about in the exhibition. At the same time that I was speaking with Rachel, we were going through the inventory of my works, specifically my works in Europe because it would be easier for transportation.

I was also approached by The Broad in Los Angeles for a separate show. The museum was collecting a large amount of my work, in order to build up a comprehensive collection, because they wanted to have a specific room devoted to my work. I told the curators of The Broad that their show would be at the same time as the Hayward show, so I suggested a collaboration between both institutions instead of struggling to do two different shows simultaneously. Ed Schad from Los Angeles loved the idea and, with Rachel, they decided to focus on all of the works on the West Coast to minimize transportation problems, as well as on works from my own collection. Indeed, I keep a lot of my work: from each series that I’ve made, I’ve kept one or two works. And if a collector doesn’t want to loan their work, they can use the piece from my collection. I have had collectors sign agreements saying they agree to loan the work they purchased for any exhibition if needed but, sometimes, you can’t force it. Occasionally, it can be unfortunate. I am thinking about one work of art we wanted because it was a very substantial and iconic piece of mine. But for the collector, it was too expensive to get it out of their home because they had to take out the entire window to remove the work. It was way too complicated and costly. And sometimes, some works are too far away - in Puerto Rico or in Mexico. So, for All about Love, we had to make decisions based on transportation and location, considering what was in my own collection. At the Grand Palais, there are 80 works and 50 of them come from my personal collection.

C.T.: How did the French jump on the bandwagon for All About Love when it appears to be an Anglo-American project?

M.T.: When the Hayward was preparing the show, they were reaching out to institutions and Nathalie Obadia, who represents me, was very involved along with her team. As Nathalie has family roots in Toulouse, she suggested working with Les Abattoirs and proposed that they look at the show in London. After seeing it, they were convinced by the exhibition and the gallery was very happy to secure a French venue for “All About Love.” Once my works were in Toulouse, people from Le Grand Palais went to see the show and they fell in love. We walked them through the Toulouse exhibition and had great exchanges, which was really nice. They already knew my works presented at l’Orangerie, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Musée Picasso, but giving them this personalized tour of the show was important.

C.T.: Do you think that preserving some of your works in your own collection gives you more freedom and independence regarding the shows you want to do?

C.T.: Do you think it’s important, especially as a woman artist, to try to change the rules of the market and the way things work with institutions? Now that you are well-known, it seems you are trying to change the way the system works to make more room for women artists.

M.T.: Of course, I’m trying to change the way the system works, also regarding discounts, residual rights for artists, the secondary market, equity about sales, budgeting when it comes to shows, etc. When a black woman and queer artist is preparing a show, people want to show her work but they say they have no budget. But when it comes to famous white male artists who cost millions of dollars, there is money for shows. But for other artists, we have to work with what’s left. There are a lot of disparities and ways in which we contextualize female artists and female artists of color when we want to show them, and they are not always given enough. There are limitations.

C.T.: Do you have the feeling that these limitations were imposed on you when preparing shows in France?

C.T.: Do you think that, as a Black woman and a queer artist, you had to first do projects based in conversations with European masters at l’Orangerie and the Musée Picasso, and then be part of a collective show at Fondation Louis Vuitton to be able to eventually present your solo show in France? Were these mandatory steps?

The time I spend in museums to look at the work of other artists is important. I look at the titles, the dates, the scale. I need to be physically connected to the works of art. When I analyze the scale of other works and how I feel in front of them, I think about the size and scale of my own works. I look at the composition, the formal aspects. How is the face against the edge? How is that gesture? I look at the art language. I pay attention to all these elements and details because I am also a teacher.

C.T.: Where do you teach? I did not know that you were also teaching.

M.T.: I taught at many universities and I’m right now at Columbia University. Actually, I’ve been teaching most of my career, at Yale, the School of Visual Arts, etc. I think it’s important for artists to connect with education, whether they have a great career or not, because they are incredible for our ecosystem of creativity. I want to be tapped into how the Youth are thinking and to guide and facilitate how they think and see. Most of the times, when I’m engaging in conversation with them in their studios, I’m asking them to really think about their art beyond the making, beyond being a practitioner. I can’t really teach them how to be an artist, but I can provide them with some tools to navigate and become artists. There’s no right or wrong way of making art because art is really individual. When I’m working with students, I want them to take some distance from what they see, feel, the tools they are using, what meaning they want to convey, etc. I’m not going to teach them how to make a painting or how to draw, but I’m going to tell them how to use some tools and techniques to make an image for themselves, because everyone’s going to make something different. I like to go to their studios and see how they use their resource material, what they are looking at, what they are reading. I also tell them about the discrepancies between what they tell me and what they have actually produced. Sometimes their works express more excitement and investment than what they explained. I encourage them to see their work differently.

I also have an internship program where I work with some partner schools and we welcome their students for three to six months. I’ve had great interns from Yale University who worked on my website or on administrative tasks and some who mixed paint color for me. They can also work on the production side; it depends on where they study and what their focus is. I have assistants as well. Some of them come from art schools and most of them are artists, and some of them are art historians or admins. It is really important to surround yourself with people who are learning because it allows you to continue learning. I’m still making art and there are still new things I want to do. I haven’t made all the art I want to make, and I haven’t made all the art that’s going to be my best work. I still think there’s so much to learn and so much work to do. For instance, I want to do more sculpture and ceramics. I cannot improvise on this, I need to learn and it has to be connected to my process and my practice.

C.T.: I’m interested in the commitment of African-American artists to public art. Have you been asked to do commissioned public art?

C.T.: Could you tell me more about your approach to self-representation? There are many self-portraits in various formats, in paintings, videos.

M.T.: Representing myself is actually quite easy for me because I’m really connected to who I am as a person in the world. To understand how I want to see people or position them, which posture should they adopt or what I’m asking from them as my sitters, I need to know what that feels like. I need to know what it’s like to be gazed at, to be nude or reclined. If I’m going to ask someone to do that, I want to be sure that I understand what I’m asking them and to share the experience. Just like some of the best directors, I want to know what it’s like to be on the side of the actor. That way, when I ask someone to recline like this, I know what that feels like. I know what I’m able to pull out of them because I’ve been there as well. As for the nude self-portraits, it makes sense to me to compare my own self, my own body and representation of beauty with current beauty standards. I need to express the physicality of who I am. My work is about me in fact, and sometimes, the sitter is kind of a conduit for who I am; I am using my models as stand-ins for many emotions and, even if they are the central figure, the work is also really about me. They are a kind of vessel for my own experience and my own emotions. However, in my early works, I concentrated on self-portraiture because it was easier for me to take pictures of myself and then use these resources to paint from, or to look in a mirror, hold it up and paint.

C.T.: Choosing a work in which you are self-portrayed for your first public art piece is meaningful and very brave because you expose yourself. Could you tell me more about the political dimension of your work and why you are using rhinestones and glitter to make political statements?