arts

MICKALENE THOMAS DESIGNED A ROOM-SIZE TABLEAU FOR HER FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION IN TEXAS, WHICH IS ON VIEW AT RICE UNIVERSITY’S MOODY CENTER FOR THE ARTS THROUGH JAN. 13.

The piece: “Waiting on a Prime-Time Star” The artist: Mickalene Thomas Where: Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, 6100 Main; 713-348-4772, moody.rice.edu Special event: “Dimensions Variable,” noon-5 p.m. Saturday

Why: The women Mickalene Thomas paints are powerfully sassy and boldly sexual, lounging across glittery collaged paintings, photographs and videos that dare viewers to look where they shouldn’t.

Thomas, who is from Brooklyn, often borrows ideas for her compositions from classics of art history — Claude Monet’s water garden, say, or figures by Henri Matisse — but remakes them to explore female sexuality, identity and power. This show’s title alludes to the late Robert Colescott’s 1977 painting “Colored TV (Wishing on a Prime-Time Star),” which features a character who might have inspired Thomas.

Her real muse is her late mother, Sandra Bush, a fashion model who belonged to the sisterhood of the ’70s. That brash period has never looked so nostalgically cool as it does in the show’s highlight, a crazyquilt of a room installation that’s detailed to every inch of its vintage-look furnishings and accessories. Thomas’ 23-minute documentary film “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman” plays on the small screen of the TV at the installation’s center. Unfortunately, visitors can’t approach it to watch up close, so the film is more of an echo than a force.

Thomas sets live models within similar tableaus in her studio to create her photographs and paintings. In some ways, the canvases in the Moody Center’s Brown Gallery are more enveloping, nearly swallowing viewers with their monumental size. They confront viewers not so much with their semi-nude subjects — Gloria Steinem posed as a Playboy decades ago, when this kind of feminism was controversial — but with their joyful, lavish and outlandish glamour. The paintings shine, literally, with their incredible detail and texture.

Saturday the show comes to life in another way, with a day of performances dubbed “Dimensions Variable.” The event starts at noon with a premiere by Hope Stone Dance, followed each successive hour with a poetry reading by Houston Poet Laureate Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, a fashion show by Onyii & Co., music by DJ Flash Gordon Parks and a presentation by photographer and graphic designer Mike Frost.

Crank up the Diana Ross, baby.