Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is the first major international tour focused on the work of pioneering artist Mickalene Thomas (American, b. 1971), whose influences range from 19th-century painting to popular culture. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and The Broad, Los Angeles, and in partnership with the Barnes and Les Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse, All About Love is being shown as a series of independent presentations, with further venues to be confirmed.

The Barnes presentation of All About Love showcases a selection of vivid artworks—paintings, collage, photography, video, and site-specific installation—that celebrates Thomas’s distinctive artistic practice from the late 2000s to the present day. Her work is characterized by spectacularly staged, rhinestoned, large-scale painted tableaux and bold, intimate compositions, decisively foregrounding Black femininity in abundant realms of visual pleasure, agency, and kinship. Whether in imaginative dialogue with canonical works from the history of art or playfully reckoning with popular culture, Thomas’s exuberant portraits offer an empowered vision of beauty and desire, formulated through a sensual, Black feminist lens.