Mickalene Thomas was born in 1971 in New Jersey (USA). She lives and works in Brooklyn (New York, USA).
A multidisciplinary artist among the most well-known within the contemporary art scene in the U.S., Mickalene Thomas has participated since 2003 in numerous national and international exhibitions. She is known for mixing references to art history, politics, and pop culture in order to create captivating paintings that are both figurative and non-figurative. Her work is rooted in a long study of art history and classical portraiture, into which she introduces a complex notion of femininity that questions beauty standards and aesthetic representation.
Her first major solo show took place in 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California. In 2016, Mickalene Thomas had solo shows primarily in the U.S. in places like the Aspen Art Museum as well as the MOCA Grand in Los Angeles. The following year sent her work to the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint-Louis, Missouri among others, and in 2018 her work was exhibited at a the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (USA). The artist also enjoys many recent successes marked by several solo exhibitions: "Mickalene Thomas: Black Women" has been presented at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans after the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in late 2019, into 2020; the artist has also mounted an exhibition at the Bass Museum in Miami in December. In 2022, the solo exhibition Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris was her first major museum exhibition in France. In 2024 and 2025 she benefits from a solo touring show starting at the Broad in Los Angeles (USA), and touring to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (USA), before coming to the Hayward Gallery in London (UK) and to Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (France).
She has also contributed to a large number of group exhibitions, including at the International Center of Photography in New York City, at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, at the San José Museum of Art, at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Additionally, since 2018 her exhibition-"Posing Modernity: the Black Model from Manet to Matisse"-can be seen in numerous museums and art centers including the Gibbes Museum of Art (North Carolina), the Museum of Fine Arts of Salt Lake City (Utah), and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in New York City.
Her artwork is included in the permanent collection of numerous American museums, among others the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Mickalene Thomas has been represented la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2014.