Fall/Winter 2024 Exhibition
Mickalene Thomas: Sandra, She's a Beauty, 2009
October 1, 2024 - February 17, 2025
Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade
The moment I started photographing my mother was the moment my work completely changed.
— Mickalene Thomas
On the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade this fall from October 1, 2024 – February 17, 2025, the photo collage of a mother, crafted by her daughter, welcomes visitors to the Gardner Museum. Clothed in regal red, Sandra Bush, mother of multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas, both recalls and rejects the dominant canon of Western portraiture with a radiant smile. An artist whose work aims to embolden, Thomas began to photograph Sandra while she was still a student at Yale. This lightning rod moment gave birth to numerous paintings, collage works, and photographs that serve as a daughter’s homage, aspirational mirror, and practice through which to examine the power of self-possessed beauty.
For the Gardner Façade, a public art space for the enjoyment of all, Mickalene Thomas reimagines a photographic collage of Sandra from 2009 in relation to Édouard Manet’s renowned portrait of his own mother in the Gardner's collection. In doing so, Thomas simultaneously immortalizes her first muse and interrogates the nature of how Black women are represented across historical art and contemporary culture.
Image courtesy of the artist
Mickalene Thomas, Sandra, She's a Beauty, 2009. Artist rendering (detail) © Mickalene Thomas
About the Artist
Mickalene Thomas is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose work has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate portraits of Black women composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon.
Mickalene Thomas: Sandra, She's a Beauty, 2009 is supported in part by the Ford Foundation, Amy and David Abrams, and the Barbara Lee Program Fund.
The Artist-in-Residence program is directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way.
The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
