On October 13, 2022, Musée de l’Orangerie will present Mickalene Thomas : Avec Monet , the artist’s first major museum exhibition in France. A distinguished visual artist, filmmaker, curator, and Tony Award nominated co-producer best known for her paintings, collages, photographs, videos, performance and large-scale installations. Thomas has cultivated a distinct visual vocabulary of Black erotica, Black sexuality, and Black queer aesthetics centered around leisure, joy and thought. For her exhibition at Musée de l’Orangerie, Thomas has created three new large-scale collages, one monumental painting and an immersive site- specific installation featuring her 2016 video/sculpture Me As Muse . These works represent the breadth of the visual language the artist has developed over the past twenty years while also revisiting the time she spent as an artist-in-residence at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France in 2011.

Each work draws on and critiques art history and popular culture that offers a more complex representation of femininity, sexuality, desire and power through a dialogue with the work of Monet. By creating her own depiction of the spaces the Impressionist artist designed for himself– la maison, salle à manger, le Jardin d’Eau–and her own contemporary interpretation of the well-known work Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe , (firstly painted by Manet then reinterpreted by Monet) Thomas constructs complex portraits, landscapes, and interiors that subvert notions of beauty and femininity. Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe: les Trois Femmes avec Monet (2022) features three Black women sitting amidst a dense field of flora and fauna gazing directly at the viewer with a sense of strength, power, and authorship. The work is composed of collaged elements taken from photographs the artist took in Monet’s Garden along with prints and lithographs from her archive. The women are adorned with Afros, intricately braided hair, and fashion that nods to the 1970s, the height of the Civil Rights and Black is Beautiful movements in America. “My residency several years ago in France at Giverny, the cradle of Impressionism, made a powerful impact on me... I learned important elements that allow me to understand how you made a painting and, more importantly, that sense of rebellion that stirs artists.” While inspired by the formal rebellion of her predecessors, Thomas takes this notion further to encompass Black beauty, desire, and power.

Thomas will also present an immersive, site-specific garden space that will house her sculptural video installation Me as Muse and offer a site of reflection and contemplation around the subject of the odalisque. Me as Muse is composed of twelve stacked TV monitors depicting the artist reclining nude in the pose of an odalisque. Thomas’ form morphs and merges with abstract gestures and depictions of women from history that have informed ideals around beauty and desire–François Boucher’s Leda and the Swan, Amadeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude , Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grand Odalisque along with key Black figures such as Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) and Grace Jones. The images are accompanied by an audio recording of Eartha Kitt describing traumatic experiences of violence and discrimination. This multimedia installation offers the conceptual framework for the exhibition that invites a more expansive reading of the work of artists like Monet and examines how identity, gender, and subjectivity have been informed by the fetishization of the female body throughout history.