Part of the Mickalene Thomas's ongoing series titled Jet Blue (2018 - present), this bejeweled photo collage seems simultaneously to be constructing and deconstructing an image of Black, female beauty. The word Jet in the title references the incredibly influential Black magazine which published its first issue in 1951, while the word Blue is a nod to the idea of sexuality, evoking the blue wrappers Parisian stores once used to cover the front of erotic books. Partitioned into four sections the woman’s body is shown in a variety of hues, a luxuriant rainbow of Black sensuality. Thomas playfully censors the midsection of the figure with a digital blur, doubling the woman’s own use of an oversized hat to cover part of her body. While the blue “taped” elements hold the image to the surface, the rhinestone borders surrounding the elements suggest the figure is confidently breaking out of the frame.

Conceptually, collage is about representation and contextualization—what is allowed to be seen versus what is covered up, and how a constructed or manipulated images is perceived and understood by a viewer. Mickalene Thomas’s collages embody the effort to build spaces of beauty and contemplation in which Black femininity and sensuality can be represented and contextualized in confident, joyful, celebratory ways, free from the limitations of history and the majoritarian gaze. Thomas’s process of building a final image always begins with source photographs, which are collaged together with other materials within an evolving pictorial space. She then re-collages the collage until concept, materials, subject, and image coalesce. That final image might then be translated further into an oil painting. A crucial material difference between the collage and the painting is that the collage literally contains a history of its own making, hidden among the layers. Thomas has even described her oil paintings as never completely satisfying in themselves. “I always felt like I had to put something on it or it was never finished,” she says. Using chopsticks to add rhinestones onto the painting’s surface is one way she continues adding literal and metaphorical layers to the final image.