Press

In the high-ceilinged brutalist halls of London’s Hayward Gallery, Mickalene Thomas’s exhibition, All About Love, unfolds as a glorious homage to Black womanhood in domestic settings that intertwines personal narrative with cultural commentary. Renowned for her vibrant, multilayered, multi-textured, rhinestone-studded portraits, the exhibition, whose title is a nod to bell hooks’ seminal work, centres love - self and otherwise - as a transformative and radical act. Hence Thomas’ practice, which comprises photographs, collages, paintings, installations and films celebrating the beauty, complexity, magic, sexuality, and resilience of Black women is ultimately a love letter to her subject. One of which was Sandra Bush; Thomas' mother, a former fashion model who battled with addiction for much of her life. She is the woman the pioneering artist refers to as ‘my first muse’. On stepping into the gallery, one of the first of many arresting images visitors are greeted by is Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher. This gargantuan collage of a striking, beatific Black woman with a glistening dark afro - the sparkle is courtesy of glitter and rhinestones - set against a backdrop of brocades, sequinned lace, beading and pieces of wood. It is based on a photograph of the artist’s mother. Another part of the expansive show features Thomas’ meticulous recreation of her mother’s living room. This immersive installation, adorned with bespoke wallpapers, vintage textiles and furnishings - many sourced from Thomas’ own family archive - also features a pair of Crocs - her mother’s favourite shoes which Thomas cast in bronze along with a bracelet and a pair of leather trousers. “ She hated jeans, but she loved leather pants” says Thomas with a smile. All of these personal artefacts and intimate embodiments of Thomas’ memories and formative years are set to the soundtrack of 80’s soul, ‘’Luther Vandross was always playing in the house on repeat", recalls Thomas. In an ode to Mother's Day, the artist reflects on her mother’s life; her complexities, her beauty and the indelible mark Sandra Bush left on her life and her work.

My mother always worked. She was always busy, always moving forward especially after her modelling career didn’t go the way she had hoped. She became a counsellor, working with juveniles in the state of New Jersey. At some point, she met a man who became her longtime boyfriend, her fiancé. He was involved with drugs, though as a child, I had no idea; a lot was kept from me and my brother. I began going back and forth to my grandparent’s home in South Jersey, and I think that was my mother’s way of protecting me from what was happening.

By the time I was around 11, I stopped moving between homes and was living full-time with my mother and my brother in a small two-bedroom apartment. My mother was visiting her fiancé in jail, and though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I knew something had shifted. As kids, we piece things together in fragments, trying to make sense of the world around us. I noticed my mother wasn’t working as much, and she was sleeping all the time. I didn’t realise she was struggling with addiction. I didn’t have the language for it—I didn’t grow up around addicts, so I didn’t know what it looked like, or how to define it. I only knew that something wasn’t right. And by the time I was 13, it had become clear that things were getting really bad. That’s when I moved in with my grandmother permanently. For years, my mother went in and out of addiction, cycling between sobriety and struggle. For a long time, she held it together—she kept up appearances, she provided for me and my brother, she created a home for us. She was family-oriented, deeply so. No matter what she was going through, she made sure we were surrounded by love—by our aunts, uncles, and cousins. I remember those gatherings, the beautiful conversations, the way she valued those connections. That was important to her. Still, she was what people call a “functional addict.” She hid it from so many people. Until she couldn’t anymore.

As I got older, I began to see her differently. You reach a point where you stop looking at your parents solely in relation to yourself and begin to see them as their own person. Their choices, their struggles—they affect you, but they aren’t about you. That realization was a turning point for me. I had to accept my mother for who she was, not with blame or resentment, but with love. I had to recognize that her journey was hers. My mother was a Buddhist and so when in my twenties, I began to deepen my Buddhist practice, it helped me understand her even more deeply as a person undergoing her own human revolution. It helped to transform our relationship. For the last 20 years of her life we were incredibly close—not just as mother and daughter, but as friends. We talked all the time. She shared her regrets, her fears, her dreams, her relationships, her desires. It was incredible to learn about her in that way. I found myself thinking, ‘This person is amazing'. Just before she died in 2012, I made a documentary about her - Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman - which tells the story of a mother-daughter relationship. It's really poetic. It's very intense. It's layered. It takes you on a journey of this woman who has persevered through her obstacles, but it also looks at our mother-daughter relationship and then our relationship as an artist and her muse - she is my first muse and the original inspiration behind my work.

Mickalene Thomas: British Vogue

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