Mickalene Thomas

Photo by Lisa Corson

Thomas in her Brooklyn studio with works in progress for her Lehmann Maupin show, opening later this month

Photo by Lisa Corson

Thomas considers a collage, one step in her multilayered process — the numerous steps are "what's really fun about my work," she says.

Andy Warhol Romare Bearden Henri Matisse Cindy Sherman Edouard Manet Mel Bochner Kehinde Wiley Mickalene Thomas

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"There are certain things that you have a crazy fascination with, that just move you," says Mickalene Thomas. "And wood grain does that for me — I think it’s because I grew up around it. It’s very nostalgic." One corner of the 38-year-old artist’s Brooklyn studio is a set designed like a 1970s living room, complete with, yes, wood-paneled walls. In this stylized environment, accessorized with a rotating set of props — wicker furniture, record albums, shot glasses and silk flowers — Thomas photographs models wearing eye-catching outfits or in various states of undress, against vivid upholstery. (She has also re-created this room before, as an installation.) The photos are artworks in themselves as well as the starting point for her collages and rhinestone-encrusted paintings, all of which are the subject of her debut show at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, in New York, from March 26 through May 2.

Thomas populates her pieces with sexy, assertive and beautiful African-American women. They make reference to pop culture and high art: girl wrestlers and disco queens, Pam Grier’s blaxploitation characters as well as Matisse’s odalisques and Romare Bearden’s abstract figures set off against patchwork backgrounds.

Wearing dark work jeans and a blue plaid shirt, her hair in short dreads, Thomas projects a more down-to-earth style than the glamorous figures she depicts. Not that she can’t play the part: Before she had anyone pose for her, she put herself in front of the camera. "I wanted to do it so I could understand the idea of dressing up or emulating icons. I had just turned 30, and I found an old photo of my mother. Her hair was in braids, and she had this leopard-print bathing suit on. I got the bathing suit from her and a wig and photographed myself in celebration of my birthday." Although this approach brings to mind the self-portrait masquerades enacted by Cindy Sherman in her "Untitled Film Stills," she says it was directly inspired by Jet magazine’s Beauty of the Week feature — a housewife or college girl whose photo was published along with a little description of her hobbies, achievements and personal history.

Immersed as she was during her youth in the popular imagery of publications like Jet and Ebony and of ’70s funk and soul music (some of her paintings are titled after songs), Thomas, who was raised by her mother in northern New Jersey, was also looking at fine art. "My mother put me in the Newark museum after-school program, and we took field trips to the Met. Art was something I had fun doing and was good at, but I wanted to be a lawyer." After high school she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she befriended many of the artists and musicians who formed a vibrant but relatively small creative community there. "It was easier to figure out what I wanted to do in a place like that than in New York," she says. A friend asked Thomas to join him on an art-therapy retreat. He didn’t go, but she did and made "all of these crazy drawings" that to her surprise, became the basis of her portfolio. She was admitted to the San Francisco Art Institute but wanted to be closer to her family, so she applied and went to the Pratt Institute instead. By the time she graduated from the Brooklyn art school with a BFA, in 2000, she had made a lot of "sloppy but satisfying" abstract dot pictures. "Basically I made a painting a day. My professors weren’t into them — I think they wanted something more minimal — but they got me into Yale!" she exclaims, laughing.

At Yale, Thomas experimented with various abstract and conceptual styles ("I was all over the place") and even imitated her mentor there, Mel Bochner, with some text paintings. After an unsatisfying phase using glitter, she began to incorporate rhinestones into her paintings. "It was a sense of landing home again," she says. "It was meditative, and there was more immediacy." This discovery — and that of photography, after the Yale faculty suggested she take a class in the medium — opened up her work.