Mickalene Thomas:
Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities

As the Aspen Art Museum’s 2015–2016 Gabriela and Ramiro Garza Distinguished Artist in Residence, New York–based artist Mickalene Thomas has developed a new body of work in the medium of film and video. The AAM’s exhibition Mentors, Muses, and Celebrities recasts and reconfigures notions of beauty, gender, race, and representation. Thomas uses the copy-and-paste sensibility of her paintings and collages to edit portraits of women together, creating a larger narrative of what it means to be a woman in the world today.