Installation view of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love. Mama Bush: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher, (2009). Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery. The exhibitions are on at the Hayward, Southbank, London, until 5 May 2025
I was bemused initially by the fact that the Hayward Gallery had chosen to exhibit these artists simultaneously, and was wary of them being diminished by being shown in reduced gallery space. However, the gallery has been expanded so that Mickalene Thomas’s work is shown in the Hayward’s usual space and Linder Sterling’s exhibition takes up a new space that runs from the front to rear of the ground floor.
The juxtaposition of the two artists thereby facilitates comparison of themes and methods that are shared between them, and allows for consideration of how their commonalities and differences might help us negotiate the reactionary moment within which we now have to function creatively, and how these artists’ works might provide possible oppositional resources.
Mickalene Thomas works on portraits on a massive scale – vibrant, glitter-strewn , with strong, queer, women shown and celebrated. The works are part-paintings, part-collages, copiously decorated with rhinestones and coloured beads. Thomas remarks on how relaxing she finds the act of gluing the rhinestones to the portraits – in doing so she is making a tiny celebration of each life again and again as she places them in situ. Thomas is clear that her influences come from both within and without the art world – there are clear and deliberate references to Matisse and Picasso but also to bell hooks , Toni Morrison and to Jet and Ebony magazine covers as inspirations. The works here – the portraits in particular, but also the photographs and the installation – are a joyful celebration of queer community, and but also of a particular time and place, which has now been lost.
Mickalene Thomas grew up in the 1970s in Hillside, and East Orange, New Jersey. Her mother, Sandra “Mama Bush” Bush modelled, and pushed Thomas by enrolling her in not-for-profit after school art programmes. Thomas is open about her mother’s battles with addiction and the impact this had on her own life, but she celebrates Mama Bush throughout her work. In a sense every fierce portrait here, every brightly-coloured giant, defiant woman captured in the rainbow shine of Thomas’s enamels and rhinestones and glitter, has an aspect of Mama Bush, of surviving, resisting and standing proud.
Carrie Mae Weens is an acknowledged influence. As Thomas says of first encounter with Weens’ art: “It was the first time I saw work by an African-American female artist that reflected myself and called upon a familiarity of family dynamics and sex and gender.” Thomas’s work is about visibility, about celebrating black, lesbian women, simply and proudly. She models her subjects in the classical poses used by Manet and other early modernists for their models, and thereby demands that her subjects be granted recognition on the same terms – and she subverts all this yet further by removing the male gaze of the artist. These are black queer women being celebrated by a black queer painter. Within her collages she will sometimes use a snapshot of the subject’s eyes, so that while the layered artifice, building up to a bricolaged beauty, is apparent, the look outwards from the frame is that of the person both in essence, and as portrayed.
One of the great things about Thomas is that she can switch from laugh-out-loud silliness to hard-edged seriousness between her works. Thus, a wonderfully camp installation features enameled scenes of wrestling bouts between 2 women (both in fact are Thomas, even within the campness there is always a sucker punch) and there is “shrine”— a collection of wrestling figures, stickers featuring Pam Grier, handwritten notes by Thomas about her life, her practice, and how they connect.
Alongside these though is “Me as Muse”– a video installation where the screens show Thomas posing naked while audio of an Eartha Kitt interview charts her lifelong loneliness and the racial abuse she endured throughout her career. Kitt, we should note, also paid a price for her anti-Vietnam war stance. In 1968, at a press conference at the White House, she stated “The children of America are not rebelling for no reason… You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed.” She was then targeted and vilified by the CIA. With the onset of the AIDS epidemic she became an ally of and activist for LGBTQ+ rights. It is fitting therefore that she is part of the pantheon of powerful black women that Thomas celebrates in her work.
Active as well as aesthetic resistance
We are, though, long past the time when simple celebration will suffice. There is an ineffable sadness that grips when seeing Thomas’s glamorous salute to her comrades, lovers, heroes, at a time when the Trump administration has the victories of the queer community in its sights. History is to be bulldozed into reverse. Occupying the space Thomas has opened up for celebration will take active as well as aesthetic resistance.
At the end, the focus shifts. A black body is painted being carried in the midst of an onslaught of tear gas. A rebel raises a fist in the face of cop guns and black deaths. The names of those being killed are painted on the canvas – Dante Wright, Andre Hill, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. The bodies pile up. Thomas paints images taken from Picasso’s Guernica and paints them onto scenes of black revolt.
All the joy and optimism of the bold, beautiful portraits feels like that of a different time – the era of the Obamas, when however little the administration may have delivered economically, there was at least real recognition of the lesbian and gay community. And there was the symbolic value of the Obamas in the White House – not the revolution by any means, but at least an improvement on the dreadful politics and instincts of the Reagan/Bush years.
All of this has gone now, however much or little we may argue it was really worth. We have gone back to a time when bricks and petrol bombs and bodies facing down CS gas are what will keep the space open. When fascist groups are empowered and Guantanamo Bay gets ready to expand.
Thomas, as we see here, will not look away. In All About Love (2001 Harper Collins), bell hooks , at a time of crisis in her life, writes of seeing graffiti on a construction site wall that reads “The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.” She notes that “Overcome by sensations of being pulled underwater, drowning, I was constantly searching for anchors to keep me afloat, to pull me back safely to the shore.” It is one of the functions inherent in Thomas’s art, at its glitter and rhinestone’d best, that it can stop us being overcome “in the face of great odds.”
Linder Sterling ‘s work, as exhibited in her career retrospective, Danger Came Smiling, takes a more confrontational approach. Linder’s work will be familiar to some as a result of her having designed the sleeve for Buzzcock’s Orgasm Addict and Magazine’s Shot by Both Sides single sleeve and Real Life LP cover. Her band Ludus fused jazz, punk, dub and an abrasive Beefheartian noise with a feminist challenge to the kicking-downwards macho culture of the late 1970s. (“Danger Came Smiling” is also the title of a Ludus track.)
She produced the Secret Public fanzine with Jon Savage. She was part of that great flux of kids raised on books and boredom who came together to improvise a culture from (spiral) scratch. In a 2010 interview , Linder talks of how she sees art as “the conversion of a personal experience into a universal truth – or making a trip to the chip shop sound cosmic.”
It is certainly the case that her art has more play in it than she is given credit for, converting erect penises in porn shoots into various forms of phallic food – the eclair, the hot dog etc. – which deliberately brings to mind Carry on at Your Convenience as much as it does Dali. But her work is nevertheless, the application of a scalpel blade to an image to produce a photomontage. Her early work focuses on the subversion of the idealization of the bourgeois family and its pornographic shadow, by splicing them together, and exposes the commodification of the female body by superimposing the commodity onto the face or sexual organs of that body. Its precursors are John Heartfield, who was rediscovered by many of us in the 1970s as an influence when looking to make posters and magazine illustrations that addressed the rise of the National Front and the British Movement. Also Dali, Max Ernst, Ithell Colquhoun and the St Ives Modernists, Barbara Hepworth in particular.
Across the galleries, we see the range and play and excoriating wit of Linder’s works, from the masks made from lingerie (similar to the “body stocking” masks made by Leigh Bowery around the same time) worn by Howard Devoto in early Magazine performances, to the early cut-ups. Then on to later works which celebrate the glamour of working-class women in Liverpool, and the safety and spontaneity and sheer fun that she discovered the gay and drag clubs of Manchester and Merseyside.
Then there are the series of works which subvert pornographic images of women simply by combining them with cut-outs of flowers and shells and gifting them an ethereal beauty which comes partly from the juxtaposition of the images and also from the way in which when black and white and colour are combined, or different print formats overlap, there is an almost spectral exchange/overlap between them.
One of the things Linder does when faced with really cheap, crude porn imagery, is exaggerate it, amplify the grotesque, by fusing food and porn and fashion so that they become entirely ridiculous. She grasps fully what John Berger referenced in “Political Uses of Photo-Montage”(1969):
… because these things have been shifted , because the natural continuities within which they normally exist have been broken, and because they have now been arranged to transmit an unexpected message, we are made conscious of the arbitrariness of their continued normal message. Their ideological covering or disguise , which fits them so well when they are in their proper place that it becomes indistinguishable from their appearances, is revealed abruptly for what it is.Appearances themselves are suddenly showing us how they deceive us.
Linder’s work though is not only a work of intervention, of cutting through the illusions that prop up the rotten state of things. It is also a realm of dream and pleasure – of shells, flowers, and dancers cut from childhood ballet annuals. And her ballet, Children of the Mantic Stain, which she has described as bringing to life every photomontage she ever made. It features seven dancers and a rug, the “eighth dancer” – the rug, made by Linder, is backed with gold lamé as a knowing wink to Elvis Presley’s $10,000 gold lamé suit made by Nudie Cohn in 1956.
Mantic, as Linder explains it “is of Greek derivation, it means “oracular, divinatory”, it also points towards a state of divine possession.” So on one level its about getting fucked-up and maybe the rug is the one people roll around on in Echo and the Bunnymens’ “Villiers Terrace” –but the swirling colours of the rug represent the enamel experiments that Ithell Colquhoun played with and which Linder has used to decorate some of her later nude images. And Children of the Mantic Stain was a 1952 essay by Colquhoun – the swirling pattern takes us full circle to the influence of Surrealism, as it breaks out of its male-dominated art-prison, kicking Roland Penrose hard in the bollocks.
The images that stay with you though are the man with the Super-8 camera as an eye and his partner with her eye burnt out by a cigarette; the film of Linder weight-training after being physically and sexually assaulted; and getting ready for war. As she put it in 2017, at the time of the first Trump presidency: “The political challenges that we met in 1977 could turn out to be very similar to some of the challenges that we’ll have to meet.”
Can art be a weapon in a time of increasingly undisguised social war? Not if we want art to function as a piece of crude propaganda. If, though, we want art to give space to the possible, to provoke the imagination, to be the cut-out fork that is stuck into the eye and the glitter and rhinestone on our shield, then these artists set out histories of how we might try.
