Mickalene Thomas Takes on Black Masculinity, Wants an Armor Made of Margiela and Rick Owens

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Mickalene Thomas has spent decades building one of the most distinctive visual languages in contemporary art — rhinestone-encrusted portraits of Black women, bold with glamour and gravity, often channeling the spirit of her late mother, Sandra Bush. Now, for the first time in more than twenty years, she's shifting her gaze. Her new body of work, Beneath the Moonlight, currently on view at The Shepherd in Detroit, centers Black male bodies — including non-binary individuals and trans men — with the same unflinching tenderness she has long brought to the feminine form.

The pivot wasn't strategic; it was personal. Thomas describes seeing herself within the Black male body — through her brothers, her friendships, her ongoing reckoning with how society imposes and strips weight from Black men and women alike. The show's title pulls from the 2016 film Moonlight, but Thomas reaches further back, imagining Black men on transatlantic ships, severed from every role — protector, provider, father — that had defined them. Beneath the Moonlight is grief and tenderness rendered in paint. Her key work, In Blue: The Odalisque, reimagines a bed as a floating vessel, the figures fused with ocean and reef, rooted in African spiritual tradition. The velvet fabric, she says, feels like water.

The Armor She'd Wear

The show follows a massive solo exhibition, All About Love, which closed this past April at the Grand Palais in Paris — and Thomas isn't slowing down. Her reading list alone signals where her mind is: all of James Baldwin, Michelle Wallace, bell hooks again, everything orbiting Black male desire, resistance, transformation. She traces her early visual obsessions back to stumbling on William H. Johnson while flipping through stacks at Powell's Books in Portland — his jazz-like geometry, those expressive oversized hands, the bold naiveté that felt entirely intentional. It cracked something open. Her first major inflection point came later, in 2010, when curator Klaus Biesenbach invited her to create site-specific work across MoMA and MoMA PS1 — her first time building images outside the studio, which changed everything about what she understood her practice could be.

According to Harper's Bazaar, when asked about her personal style, Thomas dismissed the idea of a single forever outfit with characteristic bluntness — "Never. Not just one outfit. Who wants to do that?" — before describing what she'd actually want: a fusion of Margiela, Rick Owens, Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Dior, assembled into something that reads as armor. A knighted uniform. It's a telling metaphor from someone whose paintings have always been about protection, power, and presence.

Thomas defines love as the through-line of everything she makes — "heart to heart" connection, desire made visible — and Beneath the Moonlight is no exception: it's what happens when one of the sharpest artists working today decides that expanding her circle of care is worth the vulnerability of starting over.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.