From collages to photographs, The Broad’s showcase of “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” brings Thomas’ life’s work through an extensive journey that showcases her pains, strengths and sensitivities.

Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas is known for her paintings featuring Black women during leisure. She is also known for mixing photographs with collage and her continuous use of rhinestones to highlight her subjects.

The exhibition begins with portraits of Thomas’ mother, but they are placed inside a very warm living room, inviting the audience in to enjoy the privacy of the pieces.

“Mickalene is an advocate of making her installations very intimate,” said Ed Schad, the curator and publications manager of The Broad. “She does not want cold museum galleries where one doesn’t have any place to sit or is discouraged from spending a lot of time with the artwork.”

For the piece “Angelitos Negros” (2016), the audience is enticed to sit and watch the visual media piece at their own pace. The artwork is composed of multiple screens displaying some of Thomas’ muses lip-synching to the song “Angelitos Negros” by Eartha Kitt.

“The song is about a Black woman asking paintings from the history of art why there are no black angels in their altarpieces, in their churches and their museums,” Schad said. “That was the ideal place to give people chairs to sit down and give them the option of spending as much time as they want in the installation.”

The reason why audiences can take their time viewing the artwork is to better understand the topics Thomas is bringing to the conversation. Whether that was her Blackness, queerness, femininity or all three, she has utilized the intersection between her identities to create a visual medium, explaining parts of her life in ways words cannot explain. In her series “Brawlin’ Spitfire Two,” Thomas portrays herself wrestling with herself, discovering and embracing who she is, even if it is a struggle.

“The wrestlers are very candid in that everyone goes through struggles of identity,” Schad said. “That work really presents that as kind of a physical theater. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a self-portrait by anyone that turns that struggle to affirm who one is into a gallery-sized installation of people physically grappling with that.”

Bringing that introspection into Thomas’ life creates an appreciation for the art and for her need to make such art. Part of that is the lack of representation of Black women in art spaces. The song “Angelitos Negros” implies Black women have historically been left out from sitting at the table, without a voice.

However, Thomas’ work focuses on including herself and other Black women back into the art scene. While Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) features a Black woman named Laure, she is depicted as a servant to a French white woman named Olympia. Thomas reclaims that part of Western history in her work “A Little Taste Outside of Work” (2007).

“One of the things that Mickalene has done in her work is she’s gone out and in Manet’s notebooks, and she’s identified that woman in the background of Olympia. Her name is Laure,” Schad said. “She made an entire series of portraits where the models and the portraits are named, and they have their own personalities.”

In Thomas’ work, Black women no longer have to be in the background but are the main subject. Western ideals of beauty and femininity are reconstructed in a way that strengthens those erased from history.

“She’s reclaiming space inside of narratives that did not include Black queer women,” Schad said. “She is moving into those territories and making them her own, bringing her friends, her family, her lovers, into these spaces.”

The work also showcases beauty in a multitude of ways, but the censorship of the female body sticks out the most. Particularly, the “Jet Blue” series encompasses the different types of restrictions based on the person doing the presentation. The pixelated fields or the tape covering the chest and or the pelvis area of the subject question how people view the naked female body and why it is viewed that way.

“What Mickalene is drawing attention to is all of the different ways that beauty is constructed, censored, enhanced, presented according to the stipulations of who is doing the presenting,” Schad said. “Beauty is not really a fixed thing; it’s something that is constructed by various mechanisms.”

Thomas’ work does not only invite the audience to look at her life, but it also forces the audiences to look at their bonds with any woman in their life. It should not feel like homework to come to the exhibition. Instead, the audience should engage with the art as if it is their creation.

“Even though the show focuses on Black women and celebrates Black women, it’s really appealing to anyone that has and celebrates their relationships with their mothers, with their sisters, with any woman in their life,” Schad said.

The exhibition encourages the audience to look at the culture around them in their own terms, so it encourages people to find pieces of themselves before, during and after their visit.

“Mickalene is presenting a different thing. Instead, Mickalene is like, ‘No, you need to figure out who you are. You need to stand on your own two feet and affirm where you’re coming from,’” Schad said. “Then, you should look out onto culture as a peer, and you should look out onto culture as something that you can take or leave according to what you need to have a good life and to be a good person.”

“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” will be showing at The Broad until Sept. 29.