The Grand Palais honors African-American artist Mickalene Thomas with All About Love, a vibrant retrospective exploring the visibility and representation of Black women and celebrating love as a force of liberation, self-affirmation, and joy.
All About Love is a monographic exhibition of American artist Mickalene Thomas (born 1971, New York), internationally recognized for her bold and multidimensional practice. She explores the representation of Black women in art, history, and popular culture, reinventing classical portraiture through a queer and Black feminist perspective.
The retrospective spans more than two decades of creation, combining painting, collage, photography, video, and installation. At the heart of her work, love appears as a force of liberation, joy, and self-affirmation — a theme inspired by bell hooks’ seminal book All About Love: New Visions (1999).
Thomas’s works pay tribute to the autonomy, beauty, and resilience of Black women. Her subjects — friends, family, lovers, and cultural icons — are depicted with confidence, sensuality, and grace, reclaiming spaces from which they were historically excluded. Often adorned with rhinestones, her compositions invite viewers into worlds where pleasure becomes political and representation becomes radical.
Thomas also engages in dialogue with European, particularly French, art history. Iconic works such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) by Manet and La Grande Odalisque (1814) by Ingres are reinterpreted through a contemporary lens, placing Black women at the center of the narrative and transforming the reading of these classics.
All About Love invites you to discover a universe of love, leisure, and liberation, where beauty, intimacy, and self-mastery redefine the historical gaze on art.
