Mikalene Thomas, A Little Taste of Outside Love, 2007



This piece by Mikalene Thomas captures all the class and seductive qualities of European art, while adding a feminist, African-American twist. In part, this piece was inspired by the women of the Black Power Movement and photographs that Thomas’s mother had taken in the 1970s. The subject is an African-American woman lying on a large, beautiful bed. She’s posed similarly to Olympia and Venus of Urbino, but she’s taking over their beds. She’s saying, no longer will I be a background character in your paintings, this is my bed, and my house, and I am who you need to look at. She’s gentle and seductive, and confident. She’s not shy, but she’s not overly seductive. The painting is abstracted, so her character is flat, but the black and white pattern on the cloth on the bed make her stand out. In other artworks, black women are typically seen as servants, and they are generally very dark, sometimes enough to disappear into the background. Here, the black woman is the subject, she’s not invisible, she’s not depicted with exaggerated figures. Here she is the subject, and she is powerful, and she’s reclaiming her sexuality while also making a statement about the way that black women had been viewed in art.










https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/5044

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