Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer. Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas' compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.

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.

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)

Shortlisted for the CSA Millia Davenport Publication Award, 2021 Dress and fashion are central to our understanding of art. From the stylization of the body to subtle textile embellishments and richly symbolic colors, dress tells a story and provides clues as to the cultural beliefs of the time in which artworks were produced. This concise and accessible book provides a step-by-step guide to analysing dress in art, including paintings, photographs, drawings and art installations. The first section of the book includes an introduction to visual analysis and explains how to 'read' fashion and dress in an artwork using the checklists. The second section offers case studies which demonstrate how artworks can be analysed from the point of view of key themes including status and identity, modernity, ideals of beauty, gender, race, globalization and politics. The book includes iconic as well as lesser known works of art, including work by Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jacques Tissot, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Kent Monkman and many others. Reading Fashion in Art is the perfect text for students of fashion coming to art history for the first time as well as art history students studying dress in art and will be an essential handbook for any gallery visitor. The step-by-step methodology helps the reader learn to look at any work of art that includes the dressed or undressed body and confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see.

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.

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.

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain. Published in association with the Seattle Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Seattle Art Museum (02/15/18-05/13/18)

As art museum educators become more involved in curatorial decisions and creating opportunities for community voices to be represented in the galleries of the museum, museum education is shifting from responding to works of art to developing authentic opportunities for engagement with their communities. Current research focuses on museum education experiences and the wide-reaching benefits of including these experiences into art education courses. As more universities add art museum education to their curricula, there is a need for a text to support the topic and offer examples of real-world museum education experiences. Engaging Communities Through Civic Engagement in Art Museum Education deepens knowledge on museum and art education and civic engagement and bridges the gap from theory to practice. The chapters focus on various sectors of this research, including diversity and inclusion in museum experiences, engaging communities through new techniques, and museum and university partnerships. As such, it includes coverage on timely topics that include programs and audience engagement with the LGBTQ+, refugee, disability, and senior communities; socially responsive museum pedagogy; and the use of student workers. This book is ideal for museum educators, museum directors, curators, professionals, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in updated knowledge and research in art education, curriculum development, and civic engagement.

Reconsidering the dynamics of perception Using cinema to explore the visual aspects of alterity, Randall Halle analyzes how we become cognizant of each other and how we perceive and judge another person in a visual field. Halle draws on insights from philosophy and recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience to argue that there is no pure "natural" sight. We always see in a particular way, from a particular vantage point, and through a specific apparatus, and Halle shows how human beings have used cinema to experiment with the apparatus of seeing for over a century. Visual alterity goes beyond seeing difference to being conscious of how one sees difference. Investigating the process allows us to move from mere perception to apperception, or conscious perception. Innovative and insightful, Visual Alterity merges film theory with philosophy and cutting-edge science to propose new ways of perceiving and knowing.

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.