Camden native Mickalene Thomas’ first solo exhibit in Philadelphia lands at the Barnes this fall

After growing up dreaming of escape, famed artist Mickalene Thomas has spent strenuous hours recreating her childhood home in Camden that she couldn’t wait to leave. Her site-specific installations with mixed-fabric upholstered furniture invite visitors to feel at home, literally, in the fine arts institutions where her artworks hang.

Some 20 years into her prolific, groundbreaking career, however, she has yet to bring a solo exhibit to Camden or the Philadelphia region — until now.

The touring retrospective, “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” arrives at the Barnes Foundation on Oct. 20 marking a fall homecoming of sorts, after premiering at the Broad in Los Angeles earlier this year, and before heading to London’s Hayward Gallery in 2025. It’s her first major international tour, and each stop has a different focus.

Her visions of Camden receive a special highlight in the Los Angeles show, running through the end of September. The massive exhibit boasts 95 artworks — like the dazzling rhinestone-encrusted portraits of unapologetic Black women that have been her signature — and opens with a life-size facade of rowhouses on Mount Vernon Street. A banner hangs over one, with a defiant message in all caps: “I WAS BORN TO DO GREAT THINGS.”

It was an affirmation that her mother, Sandra Bush, wrote down the year she was dying, around 2012. Tall and captivating, Bush (lovingly called “Mama Bush” in Thomas’ portraits) grew up in Camden with her own dreams of leaving the city to become a supermodel. She never achieved runway fame as she balanced being a single mom of two, facing domestic abuse, and later struggling with drug addiction.

Thomas had a difficult relationship with her mother during those years, eventually moving in with her grandmother and living in Hillside and East Orange, N.J. Still, Bush enrolled her kids in after-school art programs at the Newark Museum and New York’s Henry Street Settlement. Thomas and her mother became closer as she entered adulthood and began pursuing photography, painting, and other visual arts.

When Thomas needed models for her photographs, Bush volunteered, becoming the artist’s first nude model. Thomas put her mother in bold, bright portraits inspired by her art history background but with a wholly fresh and radical perspective: centering Black women as muses.

For centuries, European men painted nudes and odalisques showcasing white women, from the goddess Venus to sex workers reclining on couches and beds. In iconic renditions like Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), Black women appear on the sidelines as attendants, shadowed out and dull foils to the grand centerpiece. Blending influences from 19th century masters like Manet and Henri Matisse with 1970s-era Blaxploitation films, Thomas devised large collage-like paintings placing Black women — including her mother — in a position of luxury, glamour, and sexual power, with glittering afros and confrontational gazes.

When “All About Love” lands in Philadelphia, the show will be leaner than its Los Angeles iteration, with a specific focus on Thomas’ sharp and playful subversion of the artists hanging in the Barnes today. (And without the large-scale installation of Camden rowhouses.) About 50 works spanning painting, collage, photography, and video will be on display, including the 10-by-24-foot Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires (2010), a mesmerizing restaging of Manet’s 1863 painting of the same name, instead with three Black women in a collaged and rhinestoned garden of their own.

Sandra Bush will also appear in the rarefied halls just miles away from her hometown.

“To really work along with you makes me feel like I have accomplished something,” Bush told Thomas in the artist’s short documentary Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman: A Portrait of My Mother. “My daughter, you have made me the model of the art world.” The film premiered in 2012, two months before Bush died of kidney disease.

Named after cultural critic bell hooks’ seminal book, All About Love, the exhibit is another chance for Thomas to keep her mother’s memory and legacy alive. It will be a homecoming of sorts for both mother and daughter in an exalted show of love that anyone from Philadelphia, Camden, or beyond will be lucky to witness.

“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” runs Oct. 20 through Jan. 12, 2025, at the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, 215-278-7000 or barnesfoundation.org.