Interior: Blue Couch and Green Owl

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Mickalene Thomas
Interior: Blue Couch and Green Owl
2016

About the Item

2016, mixed media collage: screenprint, woodblock, digital print and flocking, 42 3/8 x 34 1/4 inches (107.6 x 87 cm), edition of 26, signed and numbered by the artist Based on collaged paintings the artists created in 2014, the work combines a multitude of processes and elements, including screenprint, woodblock, flocking and digital printing. Interior: Blue Couch and Green Owl depicts a midcentury living room, which Thomas encountered in The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, an eighteen volume book set from the early 1970s that instructs readers how to design and care for domestic spaces. The artist used these found photographs as the basis for each composition and added her own imagery and various textures. Thomas has linked her interest in these images of interiors to both the landscape and portraiture traditions. Her collage technique emphasizes the dynamic angular lines of each image and layers together different perspectives to create complex spatial relationships. The incorporation of natural elements—from the greenery and terrain visible through the windows to the representations of birds—further evokes the sense of an expansive environment. Though Blue Couch and Green Owl does not feature any people, the print closely relates to Thomas’s portraiture practice. In her Interiors, the architecture, furniture, and the decorations of everyday spaces are entry points from which to explore questions of personal perception, self representation, and the gaze. “Oftentimes the interior landscape is created as a sort of mask,” she said of Blue Couch, “A way of not only hiding what is beneath the surface, but also of projecting an image of beauty, power, or elegance.” These particular interiors, however, are not rooms inhabited by specific people or families, but idealized—or once-idealized—rooms that serve as exemplars of “good housekeeping.” As such, these fractured, amalgamated interiors also examine the collective facades that inform our individual notions of home.

Creator:
Mickalene Thomas (1971 -, American)
Creation Year:
2016
Dimensions:
Height: 42.38 in (107.65 cm)Width: 34.25 in (87 cm)
Medium:
Mixed Media,Digital,Screen,Woodcut
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU461888853

Shop All Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas

Although she’s best known for her vibrant and textural collage portraits of Black women, contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas is in fact a master of many mediums, including photography, video, sculpture and printmaking. Born in Camden, New Jersey, and raised by her mother, a fashion model, Thomas enrolled in after-school art classes at the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York City as a child. Later, she would earn fine art degrees from Pratt Institute and Yale University.

Inspired in part by her strong, matriarchal upbringing and her own identity as a queer Black woman, Thomas focuses on female power, beauty and sexuality in her works. She cites a 1990s-era exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems’s work at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon as being critically important to her becoming an artist. In her work, Thomas commonly pulls from the art history canon, riffing frequently on the styles and compositions of early modernists such as Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, as well as more contemporary artists like Romare Bearden and David Hockney. She recontextualizes their paintings by restaging them with Black subjects, using signature materials like rhinestones, enamel and acrylic paint to profound effect. Relatedly, for a collaboration with Dior, Thomas reinvented the house’s iconic Bar jacket and Lady Dior handbag to become, essentially, wearable Claude Monet landscapes.

Thomas also investigates the idea of Black celebrity in her work, painting portraits of such Black icons as Whitney Houston, Oprah Winfrey and Eartha Kitt. In 2008, Thomas painted the first individual silkscreen portrait of then–First Lady Michelle Obama, which was exhibited for the first time in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Americans Now” show.

Thomas’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. She has received such accolades as the Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts in 2010, the Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award in 2012 and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2013. In 2015, Thomas was named a USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow.

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