Mickalene Thomas:
All About Love
October 20, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Intimate spaces and sensual worlds.
Mickalene Thomas. Afro Goddess Looking Forward (detail), 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. © 2024 Mickalene Thomas
Adults $30; seniors $28 (tickets good for 2 days); students $5; members free
About the Exhibition
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour focused on the work of pioneering artist Mickalene Thomas (American, b. 1971), whose influences range from 19th-century painting to popular culture. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes, All About Love will be shown as a series of independent presentations, with further venues to be confirmed.
The Barnes presentation of All About Love showcases a selection of vivid and multifaceted artworks—paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation—that celebrates Thomas’s distinctive artistic practice from the late 2000s to the present day. Her intricate mixed-media art is characterized by spectacularly staged, rhinestoned, large-scale painted tableaux and bold, intimate compositions, decisively foregrounding Black femininity in abundant realms of visual pleasure, agency, and kinship. Whether in imaginative dialogue with canonical works from the history of art or playfully reckoning with popular culture, Thomas’s exuberant portraitures offer an empowered vision of beauty and desire, formulated through a sensual, Black feminist lens.
Venues
The Broad, Los Angeles (May 25–September 29, 2024)
The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025)
Hayward Gallery, London (February 11–May 5, 2025)
Mickalene Thomas. Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. © 2024 Mickalene Thomas
Exhibition Organization
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes. The Barnes presentation is curated by independent curator and scholar Renée Mussai.
Sponsors
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Barnes is sponsored by:
Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund, Denise Littlefield Sobel, Marianne N. Dean, S. Christopher Scott and Dalila Wilson-Scott, Brenda A. and Larry D. Thompson, an anonymous donor, and other generous individuals.
Ongoing funding for exhibitions comes from the Christine and Michael Angelakis Exhibition Fund, the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, the Lois and Julian Brodsky Exhibition Fund, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Christine and George Henisee Exhibition Fund, Aileen and Brian Roberts, and the Tom and Margaret Lehr Whitford Exhibition Fund.
In addition, funding for all exhibitions comes from contributors to the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Fund:
Joan Carter and John Aglialoro, Julia and David Fleischner, Leigh and John Middleton, Jeanette and Joe Neubauer
John Alchin and Hal Marryatt, Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Lois and Julian Brodsky, N. Judith Broudy, Laura T. Buck*, Elaine W. Camarda and A. Morris Williams, Jr., Eugene and Michelle Dubay, Penelope P. Harris, Jones & Wajahat Family, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Victor F. Keen and Jeanne Ruddy, Marguerite Lenfest, Maribeth and Steven Lerner, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, The Park Family, Wendy and Mark Rayfield, Anne and Bruce Robinson, Adele K. Schaeffer, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Dr. and Mrs. Eugene E. Stark, Joan F. Thalheimer, Bruce and Robbi Toll, van Beuren Charitable Foundation, The Victory Foundation, Kirsten White, Randi Zemsky and Bob Lane, Anonymous.
*posthumous recognition