Mickalene Thomas - All About Love

The Grand Palais celebrates African American artist Mickalene Thomas with All About Love: a vibrant retrospective exploring the visibility and representation of Black women and celebrating love as a force of liberation, self-affirmation and joy. All About Love is a solo exhibition of the American artist Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, New York), internationally renowned for her bold, multidisciplinary practice. She examines the portrayal of Black women in art, history and popular culture, reimagining the classical portrait through a Black queer feminist lens.

The retrospective spans more than two decades of work, combining painting, collage, photography, video and installation. At the heart of her practice, love appears as a force of liberation, joy and self-affirmation, a theme inspired by bell hooks’s seminal book All About Love: New Visions (1999).

Thomas’s works pay tribute to the autonomy, beauty and resilience of Black women. Her subjects—friends, family, lovers and cultural icons—are depicted with confidence, sensuality and grace, reclaiming spaces from which they have historically been excluded. The compositions, often embellished with rhinestones, invite viewers into worlds where pleasure becomes political and representation becomes radical.

Thomas also engages in dialogue with European art history, particularly the French tradition. Iconic works such as Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) are reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, placing Black women at the center of the narrative and transforming readings of the classics.

All About Love invites you to discover a universe of love, leisure and liberation, where beauty, intimacy and self-possession redefine the historical gaze on art.

Following acclaimed exhibitions at The Broad (Los Angeles), the Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), the Hayward Gallery (London) and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), this retrospective represents the most ambitious presentation of Mickalene Thomas’s work in Paris.

Exhibition organized by Grand Palais Rmn, the Hayward Gallery, London, and Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Curators:
Rachel Thomas, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery
Lauriane Gricourt, Director, Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse
Erin Jenoa Gilbert, Independent Curator

Exhibition design: Nicolas Groult and Valentina Dodi