The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Through April 7
The “intoxicating patterns and decoration are what first grab you,” said Greg Cook in The Boston Phoenix. Mickalene Thomas’s paintings are an invigorating jumble of gingham, animal skins, and floral prints, mostly rendered in acrylic and enamel but augmented with Swarovski rhinestones. The 41-year-old Brooklyn artist, whose solo exhibition “Origin of the Universe” generated much acclaim last year, is represented here by five large-scale works—including two of vacant interiors that “seem like stage sets waiting for the stars to arrive.” The stars here gaze out from the show’s three portraits. Sandra: She’s a Beauty shows us Thomas’s mother in 2009, a “still bewitching” former fashion model, sitting in a caftan on a couch laden with multicolored pillows. She radiates regal composure, as well as a fashion sense that “teleports us to a black-is-beautiful American 1960s and ’70s.”
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Other works reach back even further, said Cate McQuaid in The Boston Globe. Many of Thomas’s lounging figures recall the odalisques of the French Romantics. There’s a key difference, though: While the dark-skinned harem girls in paintings by Delacroix and Ingres were submissive figures, Thomas turns the power dynamic on its head. In the right panel of the 2007 diptych Baby I Am Ready Now, a woman sits on a low couch staring directly at the viewer. “She’s bold, certain. The shadows along her skin gleam with rhinestones,” while the patterns surrounding her “wriggle the retina.” We can read these works as political statements, “but that doesn’t explain their sheer exuberance.” The women in Thomas’s paintings are celebrating their own beauty and allure. “If the viewer’s delectation is part and parcel with that, well, why not?”
