Madame Mama Bush

Mickalene Thomas

2012

Chromogenic print

Minneapolis Institute of Art

This large format photograph depicts the artist Mickalene Thomas’s mother, Sandra, at the artist’s studio. Deftly instrumentalizing iconographic tropes—figurations of the muse and of the odalisque—she presents a fundamental shift in the visualization of black female bodies and their power. Sandra’s gleaming breast, her vivid robe, the sensuous curve of her legs as they drape across the flowered and animal-patterned draperies of her couch, and above all her profile, turned to the ceiling in rapturous repose, claim the space within the frame as hers alone. Gallery Not on View The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Purchase Fund