Two years after Mickalene Thomas’s first visit to Paris in 2009, she returned for a residency at Giverny, the well-known home and garden of Claude Monet, where she was deeply drawn to the interior and exterior worlds he created. Now, with her solo exhibition “All About Love,” at the Grand Palais, visitors can experience her own worlds transposed into immersive spaces filled with furniture, stacks of books and Jet magazines, arrangements of potted plants, and still-life vignettes in which every object is painted a deep brown.
Chief curator Rachel Thomas, along with Laure Gricourt and Erin Jenoa Gilbert, has accomplished an utterly captivating survey of Thomas’s work, which, before touching down at the Grand Palais, made highly praised stops at the Broad in Los Angeles, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Hayward Gallery in London, and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse. The lush domestic tableaux exist among monumental artworks, multi-channel videos, and in-depth preparatory designs, with the show’s nearly 80 works staged throughout a newly reopened gallery spanning two voluminous levels. Most of the space is dimly lit, with spotlights that accentuate Thomas’s signature strass ornamentation—liberally applied not only to the outlines of her Black female figures, but also to their ruby-red lips, lustrous hair, the lines between their toes, and the surrounding decorative patterns. Many of the collage paintings on display also reimagine and subvert depictions of women that ripple through art history: buttocks by Boucher, Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, Courbet’s lovers, and Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, with nods to Warhol and Wesselmann along the way.
When the artist and I meet, she is wearing a denim suit by Romeo Hunte (she wore Dior, with whom she has collaborated on set designs and the Lady Dior bag, to the opening dinner). Directly after we speak, she’s due to join a Zoom call with MFA students at Columbia. For Thomas, can take many forms—from representing the people closest to her as soulful goddesses to encouraging next-generation artists to seek out and express what moves them.
Vogue: As we’re sitting here, Eartha Kitt’s “Paint Me Black Angels (Angelitos Negros)” is on repeat, with lyrics like, “How come you don’t paint our skin? If you put love in your art…,” while the accompanying video features several women singing over her voice. When did you first hear the song?
Mickalene Thomas: I think I heard it when I was in graduate school. A lot of what I’m excited about with my work—and I think many artists might feel the same way—is that sometimes your ideas come five years before. And that’s sort of the magic of being an artist; it’s all about time and space and resources. For me, when I heard it, I knew it resonated in a way, but I didn’t know how I would use it.
Let’s talk about love, the theme of your show, which has already toured several cities. Many of the painters you have referenced over the years—Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse—capture desire and eroticism, but not necessarily love. How does love come through in your portraits?
I think the intimacy is on a different level, because a lot of them come from relationships I have with women. Over here is Maya, who was my partner at the time. These two women [in Sleep: Deux Femmes Noirs, 2012] didn’t know each other; this was actually one [instance] where I hired professional nude models from schools. I try not to put people in particular situations that they normally wouldn’t do.
How would you rate your level of self-love?
Very high!
Do you think this is necessary to produce your art?
I think you definitely need your compass to be very centered, and to remind yourself of this even with parameters of self-care. I think I’ve always tapped into my personal journey and self-love as extensions of how I’m going to make the work. I have a hard time moving through the work or doing something if there’s no personal connection to it. It has to be organically evolved from the work itself. Otherwise there’s a struggle.
What would be an example?
Some of the work that is presented today, I tried many years before, but I wasn’t connected to it. If you go upstairs to the “Resist” section, the imagery in those works was collected many years ago. But then the unfortunate display of George Floyd really hit home, and that emoted a kind of empathy and passion and compassion for someone’s life that made me really feel connected.
How does it feel to have your art presented as part of the Grand Palais’s new programming?
Well, to think there’s also Eva Jospin, Claire Tabouret, Niki de Saint Phalle, and then Nan Goldin is coming… all these women! It’s really, really empowering to be a part of this discourse of women right now and the intergenerational and different perspectives on our art. I think it’s a really good moment. And I think [the Grand Palais] partnering with the Pompidou is a really new shift in their historical conversation. The Grand Palais is very old French history, so to move towards and integrate these new conversations of the world is really smart for them. I hope they continue it!
You are often described in precedent-setting terms. When “All About Love” debuted in Toulouse this summer, it marked your first monographic show in France. And apparently you are among the first African American artists to be honored with a solo exhibition at the Grand Palais. Does this excite you?
I’m excited about being first, but I want the doors to stay open for others. I think it’s okay if that comes with not codifying it; that we’ve done our job, you know what I mean? I don’t want to be used and modeled for something being done that’s of the moment. I want it to be like, Okay, I broke this barrier for others, and that in doing so, and having me here, we’re going to make space for other conversations—other people of color and other people of non-color that can have these type of conversations and expressions in spaces like this. And so I welcome that, but let’s continue to do the work. And one way that we are going to be doing this is by collaborating with a lot of communities through partnerships and programming. We are going to be robust about it, too.
It seems noteworthy that many of the works presented in the show are from your personal collection.
I think it’s really important for an artist to maintain some works for their collection, just for their own assets, for provenance, for other reasons. The hope is when you put your work out into the world, and it’s collected by really important patrons and collectors and museums and other institutions, that they would want to loan it. That’s not always the case today. I think there’s a lot of variables and things that are happening in the world that people are no longer wanting to loan their art. The maintenance of these collections isn’t what they used to be, and it has nothing to do with people or because people don’t care. The resources aren’t there.
Many of the familiar paintings that you subvert and reimagine—such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe or Le Sommeil—can be found in museums around Paris.
I think that’s why it’s really exciting. I think, as people come in, there are all of these references that can really inspire an audience and a viewership with engagement in what history can do, right? Here’s this girl, this artist coming from Camden, New Jersey, to the Grand Palais. And between that space is all of this experience and exposure and discovery and investigation that comes with cooling up the ideas and creating these dynamics of rhythm and perspectives that are nuanced in the history. They are complex, but there’s a way of working through that complexity and coming out the other side of it and saying, “Hey, let’s look at it this way.”
So you’re not necessarily aiming for a correction, so much as an expansion of what already exists?
It’s an expansion but it’s also just claiming some agency, you know? The works are not only physical, they’re psychological. And so within those highs and lows of the physicality of moving towards the work and standing back from it, there’s also the collaging of it—like the quilt-making of things, of histories. There’s a lot of Faith Ringgold and Romare Bearden and the Harlem Renaissance and Black American culture, while also just saying, This is me.
Has your understanding of Black femininity shifted over the years?
Oh, yeah. I mean, Black femininity is always something that I try to fully tap into, just because I tend to lead towards a masculine identity—in norms and the way I dress. And I’ve always been like that, since I was a kid. I think I’m sort of more androgynous in the space of being feminine, and I like the play of those themes. And so it’s been about understanding femininity from the point of view of my mother, because she was very feminine and very girly. What is feminine, and who has the right to hold that space, especially today? My first show in 2009 was all trans women, except for my mother. I didn’t say that they were trans women, but I was really interested in femininity from a different perspective and how that can be seen.
Does this mean that love is political?
Love is very political, and I think that’s what bell hooks says. Love is an action and it’s political because we have to choose it. And within that choice, we have to really move towards the act of it in order for it to be produced. It’s a choice to show up for yourself and others. It’s a choice to embrace other ethnicities, other cultures. It’s a choice to understand the differences of someone and not try to change them. These are things that we choose to do. And if we don’t, it’s because we choose to do that as well. And we choose to love who we want to love. And it’s okay if [that choice] changes and it grows.
In the show, you have created a few staged settings and environments with plants throughout the show as well as these printed cushioned benches we are seated on.
I want people to feel as though they can be with this for a while. When I grew up going to institutions, whether it was the Newark Museum or the Met or MoMA or Guggenheim or Brooklyn Museum, in so many of the spaces, there’s no real place for you to really get into the work. And I always found that Rothko created that moment all the time. So for me, it was really important to bring all those aspects into the space.
We’re facing a tableau of a living room. There’s a pair of heels on a plush carpet and flowers strewn across an upholstered sofa. Slow jams and R&B from Luther Vandross and Babyface are playing.
There’s some Diana Ross, too. Basically, it’s my mother’s playlist. The two framed Polaroids are actual Polaroids that I found when my mother passed. And the mirror is a mirror that I grew up with in our living room.
She has been one of your earliest and recurring muses.
My mother was very fashionable. She was very stylistic and was always dressing up. But that’s also sort of the Black community and the urban community. Your presentation, your perception of style—you didn’t leave the home without looking a certain way.
How do you think she would feel about this exhibition?
Oh my gosh. She would be… she’s here. She’s here. And she’s the reason why I’m here, for sure.
Maybe when we move past the paintings, she’s there in the shimmering rhinestones.
Exactly. That’s really nice. I love that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” continues through April 7, 2026 at the Grand Palais in Paris. A parallel presentation, “Mickalene Thomas: Je t’adore deux,” is running at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris until January 24, 2026.