Mickalene Thomas | Interiors

Though neither Blue Couch and Green Owl nor Fireplace with Blackbird feature any people, the prints closely relate to Thomas’s portraiture practice. In her Interiors, a series Thomas explores in both painting and print, the architecture, furniture, and decorations of everyday spaces are entry points from which to explore questions of personal perception, self representation, and the gaze; a couch becomes the stand in for a figure, a bowl of fruit implies that this figure will return home. “Oftentimes the interior landscape is created as a sort of mask,” she said of Blue Couch, “A way of not only hiding what is beneath the surface, but also of projecting an image of beauty, power, or elegance.” These particular interiors, however, are not rooms inhabited by specific people or families, but idealized – or once-idealized – rooms that serve as exemplars of “good housekeeping.” As such, these fractured, amalgamated interiors also examine the collective facades that inform our individual notions of home.  

The Interiors are constructed from a multitude of mediums. Collage elements of silkscreen, woodblock, etching, and digital printing are meticulously cut out and adhered to a screenprinted base. Thomas also employs highly textural mediums – wood veneer, flocking, and gold leaf – to further the sense of dimensionality in the print. The resulting prints are complex and physical, existing in the same world has her highly tactile collaged paintings.

Interior: Blue Couch and Green Owl and Interior: Fireplace with Blackbird, as well as other editions with Mickalene Thomas, are available directly through Durham Press. For more information, please contact us at sales@durhampress.com.