Mickalene Thomas

Portrait of Qusuquzah #5

The artist’s muse is a trope associated with the white male gaze, in which women subjects in art are valued by Euro-centric beauty standards. Mickalene Thomas resists this gaze in her collaged-media portraits of Black women.

In Portrait of Qusuquzah #5, Thomas’s friend Qusuquzah stares directly at the viewer. Her richly painted skin is adorned by vibrant fields of rhinestones. Depicting lovers and companions as muses, Thomas endows her sitters with individual complexity.

She states: “The women I choose are women that possess a directness in themselves, a palpable confidence that’s attractive to me and that I want to capture. . . I see them as vehicles to express my own feminine self. They’re like catalysts for new forms of expression.”