Mickalene Thomas is Reinventing Nudes

Mickalene Thomas in a self-portrait. Mickalene Thomas for The New York Times

From The New York Times:

Thomas’s approach to pleasure, which undergirds so much of her oeuvre, is more complex than it gets credit for. It’s not simply about shifting the gaze from one pair of eyeballs to another. It’s about shifting the idea of what feels good, what looks good, to one in which Black queer femme desire can be the baseline, not an aberration. In the world of fine art, “we don’t even have language for how we communicate about pleasure like that,” Thomas’s friend Xaviera Simmons, a conceptual and visual artist, told me. “Many people want to go around that, instead of going in and feeling the heartbeat of what that is.”