With antique portraits of Black Americans, Mickalene Thomas assembles a powerful chorus
NEW HAVEN — Shadow swallows the top floor of the Yale University Art Gallery. Little boxes of light smolder at intervals along its labyrinthine walls, spilling a soft, somber glow into its dark rooms. Inside the boxes, small antique photographs hold their secrets close, most lost to time and disregard. Here, amid the gloom, the sense is of a gathering of wayward spirits, a place for them to come to rest and call home.
The scene, part history lesson, part seance, is Mickalene Thomas’s “Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” an enveloping experience of an exhibition as powerful as it is lushly intimate. Its foundations are an array of antique portraits of Black Americans, mostly anonymous, most taken before Emancipation; from their softly-lit cases embedded in the walls, they’re a silent chorus that grounds the experience in American history at its most brutal. Thomas is its co-curator, with the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Keely Orgeman, and her investment is deep: The deepbrown wall color in one part of the show is based on Thomas’s own skin.
At intervals, contemporary artists, Thomas herself included, respond to the portraits with frank, sharp declarations of self, or condemnations of the history that left them to haunt the present in image but forgotten in name. Here, in the gloom, they’re among friends.
Thomas has built homey spaces in her installations before, domestic settings that give her provocative, famously rhinestone-studded portraits of Black women a more fitting home than the sterile confines of a conventional gallery. The mood is somber here: Little clusters of comfort — an armchair, a side table, an ottoman — feel like an offer of refuge for wandering spirits. To me, they indulge one of the show’s organizing principles of “critical fabulation,” the writer Saidiya Hartman’s notion of using creative speculation to restore Black stories lost to time. Thomas imagines the show as a communion across generations, a place to call home.
Absence is key to fabulation, and it arises here in unexpected ways. On a table next to an armchair in the exhibition’s first little salon is a tiny watercolor portrait of Rose Prentice, a domestic worker known to be enslaved in Massachusetts and New Hampshire before she moved to Boston after her manumission. Some facts of Prentice’s life are known: She was born enslaved in 1771, as Rose Tufts, according to Orgeman’s catalog essay; her parents were both enslaved in Boston. She was sold to a John Prentice in New Hampshire, who later freed her.
When the Tucker family bought Prentice’s New Hampshire property in the early 1800s, they hired Rose as a domestic laborer. She helped to raise the Tucker children, including Eliza Tucker McGregor, who would later commission the portrait. When Eliza married and moved to Boston’s Beacon Hill, Prentice apparently moved with her; she lived with members of the extended family until her death in 1852.
In an accompanying text, Thomas calls the painting the “central and defining” piece in the exhibition. Made by the well-known Boston miniaturist Sarah Goodridge in 1837-38, it was kept in the Tucker family for generations. Yale acquired it in 2016 from a descendent. It’s an extraordinary piece, made with great care; a note tucked into its casing implies it to be a gesture of affection: the 1889 note, written by Eliza Tucker McGregor, said that Prentice cared for her father, and “always loved him better than any of the family.”
But does Prentice’s portrait really stand apart from the chorus of the unknown? At its core, this is a show about portraiture, which is inevitably about representation, agency, and control. Whatever narrative survives with Prentice’s portrait belongs to the Tuckers, not to her; a ledger of labor and ownership is not a life story. An archival photograph of the Tuckers’ New Hampshire home recurs three times throughout the exhibition, an echo of hierarchy. A rare snippet of Prentice’s story in her own words comes from her 1841 will, where she describes being separated from her son Leonard, whom she never saw again. The portrait anchors a chapter of the exhibition Thomas calls “Solitude”;
Rose Prentice, as far as we can know, lost any family of her own.
It’s this kind of complexity that gives “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” such force. It is subtle, until it is not. Portraiture conceals as much as it reveals; what, and how, depends on who’s in charge. Contemporary pieces counterbalance the quiet solemnity of the antique portraits with resolve; these artists are authors of their own images. Curtis Talwst Santiago, renowned for miniature scenes installed in tiny jewel boxes, offers a casual moment of Black life as precious and, significantly, worthy of art: “What you doing? Just chilling with some friends,” 2017, a group lolling in a living room, radiates the agency of performing for no one. Thomas’s own works here, a trio of black and white photo portraits of nude Black women welcoming the camera’s gaze, make a complementary point: that Black people will be seen as they want to be seen, not as the white power structure chose to see them.
In the exhibition’s final salon, a vitrine sits spot-lit on a dark wood table next to a wingback chair; inside, Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 book “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” sits open to its title page, which includes an engraving of Wheatley, a Black woman enslaved in Boston, writing with a quill pen.
Wheatley’s an iconic figure in Boston; she’s part of the Boston Women’s Memorial, installed on the Commonwealth Avenue promenade in 2003. Everything known of her reveals a particular genius: She was brought from Africa to Boston by slave traders in 1761, and sold to Thomas Wheatley, a tailor, who taught her to read and write English. She published her first poem six years later, and her book six years after that.
The book is a singular record of American enslavement: Wheatley, whose literacy among enslaved people was rare, argued in the book that Black people were the spiritual equals to whites, and as deserving of freedom. A publisher in England agreed, and published not just her words but an image of Wheatley up front, verifying for readers that this was, in fact, the marvel it claimed to be: a book of sophisticated verse by an enslaved woman. It helped touch off early support for abolition, and gave Wheatley grounds to demand her freedom, which she did, from the Wheatleys, that same year.
Her inclusion here seems to bookend the exhibition in tidy fashion: From Prentice, who had no agency over her own representation, through Wheatley, who achieved more than could be reasonably imagined. But, hardly. The final word here is not Wheatley’s but the artist Bettye Saar’s. “Imitation of Life,” 1975, a three-dimensional assemblage in an upturned box, deploys one of Saar’s trademark motifs: a degrading “Mammy” figurine, a ghoulish cartoon effigy of a Black maid, perched on a pedestal of a watermelon slice and a row of teeth.
Its vicious caricaturization is offset, slightly, by a soft pastel drawing of a Black woman and child facing it; but the images are opposing symbols of the same awful reality. Lining the box are slave auction notices; one advertises a working-age woman being sold separately from her children. The echo with Prentice, and Leonard, is resonant, the loose end left dangling by a family enthralled by an uncomplicated story of its kindly maid.
Gaps like these can’t be bridged, critical fabulation or not. “Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” in its shadowy world, reminds us how much history may never be brought to light.