Mickalene Thomas’ recently unveiled mid-career retrospective All About Love is, in a sense, all about Sandra Bush — not only the artist’s late mother, but also her first muse. The model, affectionately known as “Mama Bush,” appears in several of the nearly 100 works that comprise the exhibition, on-view at The Broad in Los Angeles until September 29. Her alluring likeness is rendered in the triptych, Lounging, Standing, Looking. Some of her favored objects — from coasters to crocs — speckle the show, cast in bronze. Even Bush’s ’80s-era mirrored living room is recreated as an installation, complete with a functional turntable spinning Nina Simone. The effect is palpable, a shrine to motherly love and its power to fuel not just a practice, but a life.
“I started being an artist by thinking about my love for my mother,” Thomas tells me over the phone. “So I felt like the title was really rooted in my own trajectory, my own trajectory as an artist.”
Consisting of pieces produced over a 20-year period stretching back to Thomas’ MFA days at Yale, the exhibition reflects the 53-year-old artist’s decades-long multimedia study in the beauty, the range, and the cultural necessity of Black women. She may be best known for her photographs of heroes from Michelle Obama to Miss Major to Brittney Griner, but her painted portraits, glimmering with the elegance of an affectionate gaze, present equally forceful reflections of the artist’s love. Other totems of reverence, including books by Baldwin, Lorde, Morrison, and more, are placed throughout the multi-room show. But one text is given extra special treatment, and that is, of course, bell hooks’ seminal 1999 book of essays, which directly inspired Thomas’ title for her own inventory of love in its many forms.
“I read All About Love many years ago before rereading it and deciding to use it as a title,” says Thomas. “I had to have something that was reaffirming of my own relationship with love, from the familial, to the romantic, to myself.”
