Mickalene Thomas’ homecoming at the Barnes is ‘All About Love’

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The day before her internationally touring exhibition “All About Love” opened at the Barnes Foundation on Oct. 20, Mickalene Thomas hosted a soft opening for about a hundred friends and family.

The show’s stop at the Barnes is a homecoming for the native of Camden, whose work is known around the world but has never had a solo exhibition in this region.

“There are a lot of family members who are seeing the work for the first time, many of them only seen it and reproductions,” Thomas said. “It’s been really incredible to see how they connect with the work in person. The reproductions don’t do the work justice.”

Monumental and glittery, Mickalene Thomas’ portraits of Black women are a fever of reverence, play, nostalgia and erotic desire. Many of the works are made with a collage effect, layering textures over patterns with veins of rhinestones that make the pieces sparkle, something impossible to replicate in printed reproductions.

“They have to glimmer. We have to shine,” she said. “They are hung at a height so that you’re looking up to them. They’re feeling very angelic, like goddesses.”

“All About Love,” whose title references the book by bell hooks, was created by the Hayward Gallery in London and The Broad museum in Los Angeles, in partnership with the Barnes. The tour visits all of these locations, in addition to Les Abattoir in Toulouse, France.

The exhibition will be different in each location. When it opened in Los Angeles earlier this year, The Broad highlighted Thomas’ connection to New Jersey by creating a facsimile façade of the rowhouse at 604 Mt. Vernon Street in Camden, Thomas’ home when she was born in 1971, which no longer exists. Growing up, she toggled between Camden and Newark.

The Barnes makes no such gesture to the city across the river. Rather it includes domestic tableaus designed by Thomas into which visitors can stroll, sit and browse selected books. The upholstered benches, flooring, wall paneling and décor are designed with the 1970s aesthetic of the kind of home in which Thomas was raised, and seen in many of her staged portraits, including those of her late mother Sandra Bush.

“There’s something about memory and nostalgia that allows you to reimagine a particular time of your life,” Thomas said. “That’s what a lot of the images did for me, looking back at my photographs. I knew they had some significance and connection because they triggered for me a sense of unity and family and strength and vulnerability and love. A place where anything’s possible.”

Curator Renee Mussai organized “All About Love” into five rooms representing five “temperatures of love,” moving through sororal and social bonds, family bonds and personal love. Thomas represents herself nude, fractured into 12 video monitors, and erotic works glorifying the bodies of women, often using former lovers as models.

Mussai arranged the works so that the same models appear in different rooms, building a sense of familiarity as the visitors walks through.

“The exhibition was very much envisioned as a kind of artistic love letter,” Mussai said. “The idea for the viewer to meet recurrent muses in Mickalene Thomas’s visual universe, to amplify the sense of continual embrace, returning to muses and envisioning them over and over again.”

Thomas dips into vintage pin-ups of Black models from the 1970s and ’80s, using old Jet magazine Beauty of the Week photographs as source material, and photographs from a 1950s French erotic magazine featuring Black nude women, Nus Exotiques.

If some of the images look familiar, they are. In several works Thomas is making direct references to classic compositions of the fine art canon, including Édouard Manet’s 1862 “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (Luncheon in the Grass) and the Three Graces, a trio of mythological women who have been represented throughout art history.

Thomas returns more than once to the odalisque, or a classic pose showing a woman reclining in a suggestive way. In Thomas’s hands, it represents the artists’ sexual gaze as feminine.

She said her art history education started as a child in Camden visiting museums in Philadelphia.

“Those explorations were – I don’t want to use the word escape, I want to say adventure.

It was a way of exploring other worlds,” she said. “It’s a painted image of a narrative. Some of those things have truth in it, some are fabricated fantasies. But all work has some line of truth to it.”

“All About Love” will be at the Barnes until Jan. 12.