Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space

Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space
Author: Keely Orgeman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2023
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300273371

A close look at a new installation by renowned contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas that marks the first time she has engaged with early American history Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) has gained an international reputation for her dazzling portraits of Black women, as well as her large-scale installations that physically enfold viewers into lushly decorated, 1970s-inspired domestic interiors. This volume offers a window into Thomas's unique, multifaceted approach and introduces a new living room-style installation by the artist, in which she creates, for the first time, a homelike environment reminiscent of the pre-abolition era. In addition to period-specific textile patterns and other decorative elements, her installation incorporates a selection of small-scale, early American portraits of Black women, men, and children--from miniatures and daguerreotypes to silhouettes on paper and engravings in books--as well as a group of works by Thomas and other contemporary artists in a wide range of media. The book's essays examine both how Thomas's engagement with early American history opens up previously unexplored and fertile ground for her artistic practice and how this project constructs evocative spaces (both physically and textually) in which the lives of early nineteenth-century Black Americans can be recognized on their own terms. With an artist's statement and extensive photography that captures details of the installation, this presentation documents an exciting direction for one of today's most acclaimed artists. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibition Schedule Yale University Art Gallery (September 8, 2023-January 7, 2024)

Lumia

Lumia
Author: Keely Orgeman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300215185

A long-overdue publication that restores Wilfred to the art-historical canon Lumia presents a long-overdue reevaluation of the groundbreaking artist Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968), whose unprecedented works prefigured light art in America. As early as 1919, many years before the advent of consumer television and video technology, Wilfred began experimenting with light as his primary artistic medium, developing the means to control and project unique compositions of colorful, undulating light forms, which he referred to collectively as lumia. Manifested as both live performances on a cinematic scale and self-contained structures, Wilfred's innovative displays captivated audiences and influenced generations of artists to come. This publication, the first dedicated to Wilfred in over forty years, draws on the artist's personal archives and includes a number of insightful essays that trace the development of his work and its relation to his cultural milieu. Featuring a foreword by the celebrated artist James Turrell, Lumia helps to secure Wilfred's rightful place within the canon of modern art.

The House Tells the Story

The House Tells the Story
Author: Adam Van Doren
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781567925425

Pre-eminent historian David McCullough and noted artist Adam Van Doren unite for an excursion to the celebrated homes of fifteen American presidents, past and present.

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas
Author: Julie Crooks
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781773101231

Mickalene Thomas's vivid paintings, collages, and photographs explode off the wall. Their larger-than-life women stare back and down at the viewer, confronting them head on. Over the course of her prolific career, Thomas has created a body of work that expands notions of beauty, gender, sexuality, and race, offering a complex vision of what it means to be a Black woman. In Femmes Noires, Thomas moves breezily between pop culture and the long history of Western and African art, inserting images of Black women into iconic paintings. At times she poses them nude; at other times, she draws on elements as diverse as 1970s black-is-beautiful images of women, Edouard Mamet's odalisque figures, the mise-en-sc'ne studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidib?, and her own collection of personal portraits and staged scenes. Her ability to detect and contain contradictions and to wrestle with stereotypes translates into powerful, self-possessed depictions of Black women that confront and subvert stereotypes. Femmes Noires is a bold examination of Thomas's work and her artistic practise at an important moment in history. It blends writing from iconic Black writers and essayists (Alice Walker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Lorraine O'Grady) with 120 reproductions from Thomas's oeuvre (collages, paintings, film stills, and photographs). Original essays by Andrea Andersson, visual arts curator of the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans; Julie Crooks, curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario; and writer-art critic Antwaun Sargent complete the book. Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires accompanies an international touring exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Contemporary Art Centre in New Orleans. It will open at the AGO in late November 2018.

The Printed Picture

The Printed Picture
Author: Richard Benson
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780870707216

Relief printing : woodcut, metal type, and wood engraving -- Intaglio and planographic printing : engraving, etching, mezzotint, and lithography -- Color printing : hand coloring and multiple-impression color -- Bits and pieces : modern art prints, oddities, and photographic precursors -- Early photography in silver : daguerreotypes, early silver paper processes and tintypes -- Non-silver processes : carbon, blueprint, platinum, and a couple of others -- Modern photography : developing-out gelatin silver printing -- Color notes : primary colors and neutrality -- Color photography : separation-based processes and chromogenic prints -- Photography in ink : relief and intaglio printing : the letterpress halftone and gravure printing -- Photography in ink : planographic printing : collotype and photo offset lithography -- Digital processes : binary issues, inkjet, dye sublimation, and digital C-prints -- Where do we go from here? : some questions about the future

Derrick Adams

Derrick Adams
Author: James E. Bartlett
Publisher:
Total Pages: 74
Release: 2020-03-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9780943651507

Portraits of Resistance

Portraits of Resistance
Author: Jennifer Van Horn
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300257635

A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas
Author: Mickalene Thomas
Publisher: Strange Chemistry
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: African American art
ISBN: 9780983967200

Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) has won acclaim for her elaborate, colorful paintings of African-American women, often posed provocatively against rich, 1970s-themed backgrounds adorned with rhinestones, enamel and acrylics. Thomas draws from earlier traditions of portraiture to arrive at her contemporary sensibility. She engages with the tension between a personal investigation of eroticism, black femininity and beauty and a pop-cultural critique of the overt sexual imagery prevalent in the media--from Blaxploitation film heroines like Cleopatra Jones to the construction of middle-class, African-American taste in Ebony magazine. Her portraits of trans-generational female empowerment have been receiving attention far beyond the standard art-world venues and have been reproduced everywhere from The New Yorker to Bomb magazine. Thomas also reenvisions landscapes and interiors through playful and passionate recontextualizations of such artists as Romare Bearden, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Balthus. Mickalene Thomas: The Origin of the Universe is the first monograph on the artist, and accompanies her first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. It features a wide array of full-color reproductions of her work across media--much of it new and never before published--including photo collages and provocative landscapes, along with an interview with the artist and critical texts that elucidate her paintings' investigations of femininity, sexuality and power, and provide extensive context for her oeuvre as a whole.

Caress

Caress
Author: David Hilliard
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9781949608113

Muse

Muse
Author: Jennifer Blessing
Publisher: Aperture
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781597113144

This volume is the first to gather together Mickalene Thomas's various approaches to photography, including portraits, collages, Polaroids, and other processes. The book also includes a section entitled tête-à-tête which features a curated selection of images by artists who she considers to be an artistic community of influence--from Malick Sidibé to more contemporary artists such as Zanele Muholi and LaToya Ruby Frazier.