CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/19/2024

Celebrate Juneteenth with Mickalene Thomas’s unabashed celebration of Black womanhood

"Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher" (2009) is reproduced from Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, a staff favorite for both Juneteenth and Pride Month. “According to Thomas, it was making portraits of her mother and herself that allowed her to activate her own self-love,” Claudia Rankine writes. “It is this authentic unfolding that gets communicated to her viewer. The importance of her process mimics the journey we take in the culture as we move through acts of erasure to arrive at Thomas’s glorious embrace. In order for this process to be authentic, Thomas needed to bring Mama Bush along. What was once a question—‘That’s your mama?’—needed to become a statement, one owned by Thomas. In this way, Mama Bush and her daughter Mickalene become the artist’s most important muses. ‘That’s your mama,’ without the question mark, eventually transforms into a new understanding and embrace of who we Black women can be across time and generations. The unabashed intimacy and celebration and love of Black womanhood takes flight in Thomas’s work.”