{"id":6201,"date":"2019-12-03T13:46:25","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T13:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=6201"},"modified":"2019-12-03T13:46:55","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T13:46:55","slug":"mickalene-thomas-a-moments-pleasure-creates-a-space-for-the-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=6201","title":{"rendered":"Mickalene Thomas: A Moment\u2019s Pleasure Creates A Space For The Community\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mickalene Thomas: A Moment\u2019s Pleasure Creates A Space For The Community\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

\u201cShe built this for us\u201d, a young woman nodded affirmatively to herself as she looked around in awe at <\/span>Mickalene Thomas: A Moment\u2019s Pleasure<\/span><\/i>, a large scale site-specific installation now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is something familiar and familial about the domestic sites that Thomas installs. The esteemed photographer has always engaged Black women as muses. Queered portraiture with unabashed sheik, slay and a womanist flex. Thomas charges and monumentalizes intimate memories into entire moods; sprawling immersive environments that exploit the opulent d\u00e9cor of the 1970s and 80s. Mock wood paneling and vinyl flooring. Synthetic and live plant lined walls. Faux fur upholstered benches. The artist even transformed the museum\u2019s exterior fa\u00e7ade into a replica of a traditional Baltimore row home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A Moment\u2019s Pleasure is the largest installation that the artist and the museum have created to date, and the masterful venture marks the inaugural Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission. The museum noted that the initiative was created to \u201cprovide contemporary artists with a platform within the BMA to realize ambitious new projects and to engage with the community through one of the most accessible areas of the museum.\u201d The commission will rotate every 18 months to allow other artists the opportunity to revamp the first and second-floor east lobby and Terrace Gallery. Museum Director Christopher Bedford has christened Thomas\u2019 intervention, \u201cA living room for Baltimore\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes being the first is not always the best. It’s more challenging. But, I am always up for a challenge.\u201d Thomas shared during a brief interview. \u201cKnowing that, I said, that\u2019s great, I can take [the commission] and create a huge monumental sculpture, or, I can take that and create experiences not only for myself but for others who it would be so much more rewarding for to be included in the experience.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The work comes at a critical moment when art institutions including the BMA, The Met, MoMA and shortlist of others are being forced to reckon with their overwhelmingly white-cis-male collections and non-diverse staff. Since taking the role of Director in 2016, Bedford, and a prominent board of trustees have ushered in a new era for the museum that focuses on decolonizing its collections in favor of purchasing and exhibiting more postwar, and contemporary African American artists and women. Notable exhibits have featured works by Jack Whitten, Mark Bradford, Maren Hassinger, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Adam Pendleton among many others.\u00a0 The museum’s latest exhibition, <\/span>Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art<\/span><\/i>, showcases more than 70 paintings, sculptures and mixed media abstractions created from the 1940s to the present by pioneers and younger Black artists from across the diaspora. The museum has also pledged to review and revise gender inequity within its collection; of the nearly 95,000 artworks housed in the museum’s permanent collection, just 4% have been created by women. In 2020 the BMA has committed itself to only purchase works for its permanent collection that have been created by women artists and to prominently exhibit works that focalize women.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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While those efforts are desperately needed and highly anticipated, Thomas’ endeavor challenges the museum to confront its operational practices further by querying the ways it and other major art institutions have devalued non-white patrons and non-white artists. Thomas\u2019 work triggered several questions for me; What is a home? Whose domesticity has been deemed worthy of an exhibition? How will imbuing an elite institution with the comforts and aesthetics of Black domesticity encourage a more diverse viewership? How can the creation of those spaces break the segregated elitism of predominantly white-cis-male art institutions?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We will not see the results of many of those questions until 18 months from now when the commission concludes. I looked around at others in the room to read their immediate response to Thomas\u2019 work. I saw joy, affirming smiles, and heard sighs of relief. Relief from what, one might ask? Like me, the Black viewers saw themselves, their families, their histories, embedded in a space that rarely exhibits the nuances of black identity as eloquent points of inquiry or subjects that are worthy of critical consideration.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking at Thomas\u2019 work made me recall an old polaroid of my auntie posing in her living room.\u00a0 I remembered the pristine plastic-covered floral sofas in my grandmother’s home. The houseplants that overtook and invigorated my childhood home. The constructed environments that Thomas creates are love letters, warm, intentional homages that acknowledge and dismantle the elitist chill that resides in art institutions. By occupying historically colonial and segregated spaces and adorning them with what she has called \u201cunabashedly Black aesthetics\u201d, Thomas not only revises conceptions about who these spaces are meant for, she facilitates a shift towards inclusivity. As a result, <\/span>A Moment\u2019s Pleasure<\/span><\/i> becomes what it hopes to be, a beautiful, welcoming and accessible space for communities who may not otherwise feel comfortable in museums.\u00a0 Thomas offers a perverse exploration of what it means for Black and queer bodies to feel at home, and make a home, wherever we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked Thomas if or how people\u2019s responses to her installations inform her work or process.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOftentimes I have a part of my personality where I don’t care about their reaction of response. I think for here, it\u2019s about familiarity. Do certain illusions trigger a moment or memory of family for you? Can you find some element that you can relate to that conjures up the Black aesthetic? Whether it be the faux paneling of the linoleum form, whatever it is within the materials, what conjures up those moments for you? And it\u2019s me juxtaposing all those moments and layering them and creating one of my largest scale paintings three-dimensionally. And how do you do that so that people not only walk around but walk in? I use my visual images to create that illusion.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with a smaller installation on the 2<\/span>nd<\/span> floor, the artist also built and installed <\/span>Sylvester\u2019s House<\/span><\/i>, a fully furnished lounge and event space, dedicated to the life and legacy of the disco-era icon, Sylvester, in the Terrace Gallery.\u00a0 Equipped with a bar, cozy screening room and bright retrofitted furniture laden with the embellishments that have come to define Thomas\u2019 aesthetic, one cannot help but stay a while, sit and live a spell in the experience. People leaned against the walls sipping cocktails while they watched a selection of short films by Abdu Ali and Karryl Eugene, Erick Antonio Benitez, Nicoletta Darita de la Brown, Kotic Couture, Markele Cullins, Emily Eaglin, Hunter Hooligan, Devin N. Morris, Clifford Owens and TT the Artist. Children crawled around the furniture as their mothers communed about the intimacies of their lives. Others chatted with each other about the artists who hung along the walls including Derrick Adams, Zo\u00eb Charlton, Theresa Chromati and Devin N. Morris. All of those moments including the ways people engage with the space as well as the number of emerging artists with ties to Baltimore that Thomas included in the installation inform the work and transform the installation into a space that feels like home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat became really exciting for me\u201d Thomas continued, \u201cFor me, that became the work, that became the art– the excitement from which I could cast the net further and let other people in to utilize the space and to claim and occupy it as theirs. That\u2019s the art. That\u2019s the experience. The people are activating the space as participants. You have to hold institutions accountable so that they are also doing the work because oftentimes what happens is that they bring artists like me in, there’s rhetoric about doing the work, but they aren’t doing the work. Its table conversations about what they want to do, but when it\u2019s time for the work to show up it’s not done. For me, it was very important that the education department was very involved, that the museum be very active in the conversation. And also holding them accountable for reaching out to community organizations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of the featured artists are also Thomas\u2019 mentees and participants in networking collaboratives and initiatives that she co-founded including t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate and Deux Femmes Noires, ventures with her partner Racquel Chevremont, and The Josie Club with contemporary artist Nina Chanel Abney, her partner Jet Toomer and Racquel Chevremont.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked Thomas to share more about her interest in supporting emerging artists.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs I was coming up as an emerging artist, I felt like there was a lack of mentorship, a real mentorship. A lot of things about the art world are so complex and confusing. People are doing things based on assumptions and not real facts.\u201d Thomas continued. \u201cFor example, a lot of art schools don\u2019t teach enough about the art of business, the art of networking, finding their own studios. It\u2019s a business. They don\u2019t learn that. You learn by trial and error. Who\u2019s going to teach us that? Who\u2019s going to support that or provide that?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the reasons why Racquel, my partner and I have started Deux Femmes Noires as an initiative was because of that. She and I were both separately being approached by emerging and some midcareer artists about some sticky situations they were getting themselves in, whether it was with galleries or corporations. Artists not getting work back, not getting paid, signing away their copyrights. Just craziness. But they are doing it because they don\u2019t know, because they are assuming that, oh maybe that\u2019s how Mickalene did it. So, for me, it\u2019s providing access through me to other resources so they have an ally, an advocate. I can\u2019t solve all the problems, but I can provide a direction through my platform and my network that I have developed through experience. It\u2019s about bringing it forward so that the emerging artists are still there, they don\u2019t disappear. A lot of the disappearance is the failure of not knowing and about doing it the wrong way.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A Moment\u2019s Pleasure<\/span><\/i> continues Thomas\u2019 mission to build bridges and provide greater opportunities for queer and POC emerging artists to exhibit and have their work collected by significant art institutions. The work is more than an installation, it is a commitment to decolonize white institutions. It is also a call to action for communities surrounding the museum to make use of the space Thomas has constructed. There is healing in taking time to sit in leisure. There is freedom in occupying spaces that never imagined the relevance of your presence or pleasure. Thomas has created a powerful monument to pleasure, Black joy and the validity of our lived experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Angela N. Carroll is an artist-archivist; a purveyor and investigator of art history and culture in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia. Angela contributes contemporary art, performance and film criticism for \u00a0BmoreArt Magazine, Arts.Black, Sugarcane Magazine, and Umber Magazine. She received her MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California at Santa Cruz and currently teaches within the Film and Moving Image program at Stevenson University in Baltimore Maryland. Follow her on IG @angela_n_carroll or at angelancarroll.com.<\/p>\n

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