Feeling Myself: Loving Gestures and Representation in Mickalene Thomas: Muse

This chapter looks closely at the photographic diptych “Madame Mama Bush and Afro Goddess with Hand Between Legs”, as displayed in the 2016 exhibition “Mickalene Thomas: Muse” at Aperture Gallery in New York. Though previous exhibitions highlighted Thomas‘s innovative use of materials, the approach to her subjects and virtuosity as a painter, “Mickalene Thomas: Muse” showcased the American artist’s engagement with photography—as a medium, a set of ideas, and an institutional history. This chapter excavates some of the ways in which Thomas’ photographic work creates space for relational articulations of self-love, self-representation, and divahood that frustrate controlling images of black women in Western art. After introducing the concepts of divahood and black feminist love politics, the chapter follows gestural resonances and evocations of self-love in the photographs and the exhibition. By engaging with self-love at the nexus of pleasure, care, and collectivity, the “Madame Mama Bush and Afro Goddess with Hand Between Legs” and the “Muse” installation at large eschew representational associations of the black female body with exploitation, favoring feeling, sensual, and relational articulations images of the self in photographs.