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Artist Mickalene Thomas and her dream of making a difference
When you walk into the world of Mickalene Thomas, prepare to be dazzled. The 53-year-old artist uses rhinestones, collage, silkscreen and video to create pieces that celebrate women – proud, confident and powerful.
She may be best known for her reinterpretations of classics, like her “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe,” a take on the Pablo Picasso and Edouard Manet paintings of the same name. “Our histories are always wrought with ideas of leaving truths out, leaving people out,” said Thomas. “And so, I started questioning that.”
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Thomas shifted the focus to women she finds beautiful. Her muses are sometimes famous, more often not: “The everyday Black woman who should be celebrated; the women who are on the street, the women who are the laborers, the workers, but still exude this excellence of self-awareness and pride, and vulnerability and strength at the same time.”
“Like all great artists, she has an understanding, a grasp of what great historical artists are doing, and she’s saying, ‘Okay, I’m gonna turn that around, I’m going to make that my own,'” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, home to the exhibition, “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love.” “She is completely changing who’s centered in traditional Western (especially European) painting. And she’s centering Black women, she’s centering queer women and queer identity, and she’s doing that with these beautiful works with glitter and rhinestone, literally bringing light and illumination to those lives.”
Mickalene Thomas
The exhibit starts with a life-sized recreation of the Camden, New Jersey row houses where Thomas grew up.
Early on, she knew she wanted to make a difference, so in college she studied pre-law. “Why not think about being a lawyer, and changing some necessary laws in this country?” she laughed.
She said that “changing the world” was the goal. That is, until the day she visited a museum and saw the “Kitchen Table Series,” a set of photographs by renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems. “In that moment, when I saw those photographs at the museum, I knew I wanted to be an artist,” said Thomas. “That was it. That’s what art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to move you. incite you. And if we don’t see ourselves in images, we don’t know what’s possible.”
Smith asked, “So, you knew you wanted to do art. Did you know you could make a living at that point?”
“You’re funny!” laughed Thomas. “No!”
In fact, her mixing of media came, at least in part, out of necessity, like her signature rhinestones, which are put on one by one and can number into the thousands on just one piece. “Oil paint is very expensive,” Thomas said. “So, I used what was around me, what was accessible, what was affordable. And sometimes that was materials that other people threw away: ‘Well, okay, I can’t afford paint. But I’m gonna work with these things.’
“A lot of my process comes out of limitations. But my life has always been about limitations and working within that, around it, and through it, and above it.”
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“Above it” is right; her work is now in museums all over the world.
And just this past May, when she was honored by the Gordon Parks Foundation in New York, Thomas’ journey came full circle. Presenting her award was Carrie Mae Weems, the artist whose work had inspired her to change her life’s path 30 years ago.
Mickalene Thomas didn’t become a lawyer, but that dream of making a difference still came true. “To have an idea, and to take that idea, to transmit it through yourself, to make it come to fruition, and to make something that the world or a group of people respond to, now that’s life, right?” Thomas said. “That’s changing the world.”
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Story produced by Julie Kracov. Editor: Steven Tyler.
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A complete mastodon jaw was discovered in the backyard of a home in New York’s Hudson Valley, marking the state’s first such find in more than a decade, officials announced this week.
The Stockton, New York, homeowner initially spotted two teeth hidden in the fronds of a plant on their property and proceeded to uncover two more teeth buried inches underground, the New York State Museum said. Staff from the museum, which is based in Albany and has an archaeological research department, and SUNY Orange launched an investigation at the property.
New York State Museum
Their excavation unearthed additional fossils, including a full, well-preserved adult jaw and fragments of rib and toe bones that once belonged to a mastodon — ancient giants that existed during the Ice Age and became extinct some 10,000 years ago. The term refers to a group of massive elephant-like species, like the mammoth.
“When I found the teeth and examined them in my hands, I knew they were something special and decided to call in the experts,” said the homeowner in a statement to the New York State Museum. “I’m thrilled that our property has yielded such an important find for the scientific community.”
New York State Museum
Remnants of mastodons have been discovered in New York before. According to the museum, more than 150 fossils of these prehistoric creatures have been documented to date statewide, with around one-third of them coming from Orange County, where the latest bones were found.
But experts said the findings offer an opportunity to learn something new.
“This discovery is a testament to the rich paleontological history of New York and the ongoing efforts to understand its past,” said Robert Feranec, a research director and curator at the New York State Museum whose work centers on ice age animals, in a statement. “Fossils are resources that provide remarkable snapshots of the past, allowing us to not only reconstruct ancient ecosystems but also provide us with better context and understanding of the current world around us.”
The mastodon fossils will undergo carbon dating and analysis to determine the creature’s age, diet and habitat while it was alive, the museum said. After that analysis and subsequent preservation work are complete, the bones will be featured on public display in 2025.
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U.K. court says police can seize millions in unpaid taxes from misogynist influencer Andrew Tate
London — A court in the United Kingdom ruled Wednesday that police could seize the equivalent of $3.3 million in frozen financial assets from misogynist social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan to cover years of unpaid taxes.
The money has been held in seven bank accounts, frozen by British authorities, belonging to Tate, who previously lived in the U.K., his brother Tristan and a woman identified by the British authorities only as J.
Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court said in his Wednesday ruling that transactions made by the brothers, including transfers amounting to almost $12 million to J, had been a “straightforward cheat” to evade tax authorities.
Lawyers for the Devon and Cornwall Police force had argued that Tate and his brother were serial tax evaders who paid no taxes on around $26.5 million in revenue from their online businesses.
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According to the French news agency AFP, lawyer Sarah Clarke, who represented the police force, quoted during the proceedings from a video posted online by Tate, in which he said: “When I lived in England I refused to pay tax.”
Tate railed against the ruling, accusing the government of “outright theft.”
“This is not justice; it’s a coordinated attack on anyone who dares to challenge the system,” he said in a statement, claiming the seizure of his assets raised “serious questions about the lengths authorities will go to silence dissent.”
The Associated Press quoted a lawyer for the men, Martin Evans, as defending the bank transfers in question as “entirely orthodox” for the owners of online businesses.
Tate gained millions of followers online before being banned by TikTok, Facebook and YouTube when the platforms accused him of posting misogynistic hate speech.
Tate and his brother are currently under house arrest in Romania, where they face criminal human trafficking charges. When that case is concluded, the brothers are set to be extradited to the U.K., where they face additional allegations of human trafficking and rape.
The Tate brothers have denied all the charges of sexual violence and human trafficking.
