“Do I Look Like A Lady?”
Artist: Mickalene Thomas October 16 - February 6, 2017 MOCA Grand - Los Angeles
Curatorial Decision
Specification: Community of Practice
Do I Look Like A Lady? is an exhibition of new and recent work by New York–based artist Mickalene Thomas. For this exhibition, Thomas has created a group of silkscreened portraits to be featured alongside an installation inspired by 1970s domestic interiors, and a two-channel video that weaves together a chorus of black female performers, past and present, including standup comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Wanda Sykes, and pop-culture icons Eartha Kitt and Whitney Houston. An incisive, moving, and at times riotous portrait of the multiplicities of womanhood, Do I Look Like a Lady? builds upon Thomas’s ongoing reconsideration of black female identity, presentation, and representation through a queer lens.
Thomas is aligning her personal experience as a black woman to the greater community of black women, who often do not identify as queer. What Thomas is doing is creating a foundation for a community of practice by aligning her experience as a black woman with other black women in the entertainment industry. Using methods of collage and juxtaposition, Thomas’ artistic process embodies the idea of a fragmented community that functions together as a whole. The installation is more than just a showcase but rather an experience where audiences are invited to embrace, commune, reconvene and build bonds.
Rich with allusion, Thomas’s environments also build upon and expand her interest in how private domestic spaces function as sites of self-fashioning and display, and how class and taste are embedded in the objects we choose to surround ourselves with.
EXHIBITIONS
