Mickalene Thomas Left Behind, 2021

Name: Mickalene Thomas Left Behind, 2021
Brand: Mickalene Thomas
Price: 20000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

The new exclusive series of limited edition collages by acclaimed American artist Mickalene Thomas comes in two series of 10 unique collage prints. Phaidon, Artspace, and Avant Arte are proud to announce the global launch of two exclusive limited-edition collages by critically acclaimed American artist Mickalene Thomas. Jet Blue #11 and Left Behind (both 2021) are composed of diverse materials including hand-cut inkjet prints, pigment-printed silk fragments, and hand-applied acrylic pochoir, resulting in two editions of 10 signed and numbered collage prints. Each print comes fitted in a UV-protective plexi frame along with a signed and numbered copy of Phaidon’s 2021 monograph Mickalene Thomas, all of which is housed in a handmade painted wooden box laser engraved with the artist’s name. The box is presented in a red velour dust bag screen-printed with the Mickalene Thomas studio logo. Thomas’ artwork draws on autobiographical material, socio-political discourse, and American art influences, as well as 19th-century French painting and established figures from the international 20th-century canon. Her awareness of the complex cultural landscape of the 1970s in which she was raised—the dreams of modernism and radical calls for racial equality looming large in the collective consciousness—deeply influenced her iconic visual vocabulary. Thomas’ decades-long exploration of the Black female figure celebrates the power, beauty, and strength of her subjects with an emphasis on individuality, honoring their agency and ownership of their own bodies and identities.

Creator:

Mickalene Thomas (Artist)

Dimensions:

Height: 9.94 in (25.25 cm)Width: 7.44 in (18.9 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Materials and Techniques:

Paper

Place of Origin:

United States

Period:

2010-

Date of Manufacture:

2021

Production Type:

New & Custom(Limited Edition)

Estimated Production Time:

Available Now

Condition:

Seller Location:

New York City, GB

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU1878327241652

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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.

Find Mickalene Thomas’s art on 1stDibs today.