Mickalene Thomas USA, b. 1971
Jet Blue #19, 2021
Rhinestones and acrylic paint with collage elements of screen printing, photography, mixed media, museum mounted on archival board with gold leaf, cherry frame
49 x 37 1/2 in
124.5 x 95.3 cm
124.5 x 95.3 cm
8169
Further images
This bejeweled photo collage by Mickalene Thomas is part of the artist’s ongoing series titled Jet Blue (2018 - present). Jet references the incredibly influential Black magazine which published its...
This bejeweled photo collage by Mickalene Thomas is part of the artist’s ongoing series titled Jet Blue (2018 - present). Jet references the incredibly influential Black magazine which published its first issue in 1951, while Blue is a nod to the idea of sexuality, evoking the blue wrappers Parisian stores once used to cover the front of erotic books. The woman depicted in this collage is both separated from, and intertwined with her surroundings. She is portrayed in both black and white, and color. Pictured naked and reading, surrounded in glittering rhinestones, she projects sensuality, confidence, and glamour. She seems to thrust forward out of the picture, into the space between surface and eye, defying the limitations of the medium’s two-dimensional flatness and becoming part of the world of the viewer.
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.
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.