Talk Art · Russell Tovey and Robert Diament

Mickalene Thomas

·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Thomas describes seeing Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table series at Portland Art Museum in 1994 and says 'it gave me permission to see myself in art—that was the first time I transformed.'

1. Talk Art hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament interview painter, photographer, and installation artist Mickalene Thomas, speaking from her London hotel room ahead of the opening of All About Love, her first major UK retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. 2. Thomas is presented as a pioneering multidisciplinary artist whose work—spanning rhinestone-studded paintings, collage, photography, screen print, and film—centers on Black womanhood, beauty, desire, and domestic space. 3. The episode's core question is where Thomas's materials, imagery, and philosophical commitment to the Black female gaze came from, tracing each element back through her biography. 4. Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey and raised partly in Newark and East Orange before returning to Camden as a teenager; she describes childhood Camden as 'colorful and full of joy' and says she didn't register its poverty until seeing photographs of it from outside. 5. Her mother Sandra Bush struggled with drug addiction, and Thomas connects this to the moment Camden's difficulties became visible to her as a teenager, alongside family members experiencing incarceration. 6. Her grandmother and aunts provided stability—owning homes with backyards—and her grandmother's habit of bringing home fabrics from a Goodwill thrift shop to reupholster furniture is the direct origin of Thomas's use of patterned fabric in her installations. 7. Thomas grew up attending Buddhist meetings with her mother, who practiced Soka Gakkai International, in a community that included elder Japanese women bringing rice cakes—an exposure to multiple cultures she says directly shapes the layered material identity of her art. 8. Her uncle Charles, an illustrator, was her first model of a person making visual art; she describes him as a father figure who still attends her US shows, and says seeing him draw planted an early seed. 9. The decisive turning point came in Portland, Oregon in 1994 when a friend returning from a Nan Goldin internship in New York took Thomas to see Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table series at Portland Art Museum—the first time Thomas 'saw herself on the wall.' 10. Thomas describes recognizing her own family in Weems's photographs of a kitchen table as a space of joy, tension, love, and rest, and says the experience 'gave me permission to see myself in art and understand this is what art can do.' 11. She walked from the museum to an art supply store, bought Reeves BFK paper and oil pastels, used postcards from the show as references, and made a body of work within days that became her application to Pratt Institute. 12. Thomas's mother Sandra Bush had modeled in the 1970s and early 1980s and was discovered by the same photographer who discovered Iman; when Sandra declined a meeting because she couldn't safely leave her children, the photographer advanced Iman instead—a lost opportunity Thomas connects to Sandra's addiction and self-loathing. 13. Thomas describes keeping beautiful photographs of her mother—capturing Sandra's 'statuesque elegance, strength, vulnerability, and magnetism'—and says her mother died young at 61, with a presence that filled rooms without her doing anything. 14. Jet magazine's 'Beauty of the Week' page—featuring Black college women in gowns and swimsuits alongside descriptions of their studies and leisure—was Thomas's favorite page in the 'Black Bible,' her first aspiration-fueling look at another world, and her first experience of attraction to women. 15. Thomas says rhinestones entered her work purely from economic necessity: oil paint was too expensive, but acrylic rhinestones from craft stores cost $3 a bag and were available in bulk, and 'a lot of my art process is about limitations—about what I can't do.' 16. She connects this material logic to the Gee's Bend quilters of Alabama, whose tradition of narrating African American history through patchwork she describes as 'telling our story through the only thing we had.' 17. Thomas articulates her studio practice as operating through a 'call and response'—seeing an image, being resonated by it, collecting archival material for years before acting—citing the Resist series, inspired by images from the civil rights movement and the Tulsa Massacre, which she collected from 2021 but had been building toward for much longer. 18. When asked how a male viewer should feel looking at her work, Thomas responds: 'I can't tell you—I'm not making my work for you, I'm making it for me,' adding that the privilege of showing publicly is a gift she does not take for granted given the many talented artists who never received such access. 19. Thomas describes a large studio team she calls a family unit, operating with people who have worked with her between three and sixteen years, whose input she values and who move with the speed of her thinking as work organically evolves during the making process. 20. Listeners interested in contemporary Black art, photography, feminism, queer identity, and the relationship between biography and material practice will find the conversation substantive; those looking for technical demonstrations or gallery market discussion will find neither here.

As heard by us

Mickalene Thomas traces a childhood fascination with glamorous magazine images into the layered language of her art.

Mickalene Thomas's Talk Art appearance turns on a vivid early memory: the magazine page she loved as a child, where poised women appeared with notes on college, beauty, leisure and aspiration.

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Listen when you want an intimate Talk Art conversation about how childhood images shape an artist's practice.

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