Mickalene Thomas
When Mickalene Thomas was chosen to create art for the Leimert Park station of Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX line, she looked to iconic elements of the community’s landscape — including the Art Deco-era tower of what is now the Vision Theatre — then collaged them. She wanted residents to recognize the images in the piece.
“I think it’s important to think about the environment — about the people who live within those environments and will see this work every day,” Thomas says about being commissioned to produce a public art piece. She doesn’t necessarily think of it as her art. It’s the community’s.
In addition to the Metro commission, she’s been working on a series of collages and portraits for art shows, including one titled “Femmes Noires,” which just opened in New Orleans. The work, she says, is about celebrating black women, about “reimagining the black model through images, through the media, through our historical context” using photography, paintings, video, film, performance and silk-screen installations.
It’s all kept her busy. For the last eight to nine months, Thomas has been almost entirely consumed by studio production.
She’s also a mother of three children, ages 7 to 12: two girls and a boy. Every weekday morning after she takes the kids to school, she hops on an electric moped, stuffs her dog into her doggy bag and rides to her studio in Brooklyn.
With the help of her team, she gets to work. She returns home at day’s end, reads or meditates before bed, and wakes up the next day to do it all again.
“Right now,” she says, “there hasn’t been really any time for any other activity than studio production.”
Born in Camden, N.J., in 1971 and raised in Newark, Thomas was raised by a single mother who worked as a social worker. “A creative and visual person,” Thomas says, her mother loved fashion — she modeled in the 1970s — and had a deep art appreciation that motivated her to enroll Thomas and her brother in afterschool art programs.
After high school, Thomas moved to Portland, Ore., where she dabbled in theater and pre-law as a student. She immersed herself for the first time in artistic communities there. “I started really exploring and experimenting on my own,” she says.
So she dropped out and moved to Brooklyn to pursue art full time at the Pratt Institute. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she attended the Yale School of Art for a masters in fine arts, graduated in 2002 and did a yearlong artist residency in Harlem.
Her cross-country experiences served as fodder for inspiration. Her mother also became a profound influence for her art, which centers on black female empowerment.
The women she aspires to capture in her work, she says, are strong yet vulnerable, have prowess, charisma and fortitude. Women that persevere and are strongwilled. Women like her mother.
“Those are the women you want to look toward as mentors and the type who need to be celebrated,” Thomas says.
Meditation helps spark her creativity, as does Jet, the African American magazine she grew up reading. There there is this sage advice her mother imparted: “Be true to yourself and make what you’re going to make and have fun. Once you stop having fun and stop enjoying it, then do something different.”
So long as she’s aware and observant as she walks through life, Thomas says she will always find inspiration. It’s something she hopes to bring to the Metro riders who will soon find her art as they disembark from their train.
“I hope they’re inspired,” Thomas says, “that they see a sense of themselves and their community.” And she hopes it brings them joy. “If anything, black joy.”