Mickalene Thomas

Abstract

This essay considers how discussions of gender, race, and sexual difference converge in the work of celebrated multimedia artist Mickalene Thomas. Thomas is part of a contingent of African-American contemporary artists associated with the controversial term post-black: a highly contested terminology meant to characterize the aesthetic and conceptual specificities of post-Civil Rights-generation visual artists. Often mischaracterized as a post-racial stance, post-black captures the shifting gender and sexual politics that inform black artistic production in the twenty-first century. However, it also speaks to the need to redefine the ideological parameters of blackness in the face of persistent racial, sexual, and gender inequality. In her striking images of women, Thomas reimagines black female subjectivity beyond its ideologically overdetermined meanings, and envisions her subjects through a queer-feminist desiring lens, a gesture that dares to assert a more inclusive understanding of what—and whom—blackness may represent.