GLR January-February 2025

as Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires , Thomas’ 2010 take on Manet’s controversial 1863 painting. Her wide ranging practice extends to collaged interiors, fractured images from the African-American magazine Jet and its “Beauty of the Week” pin-ups models, and overtly political collages incorporat ing figures such as James Baldwin and Shirley Chisholm. Inspired by her first model, “Mama Bush,” who “showed me how to unapologetically love my body,” Mickalene Thomas creates portraits of a diverse range of friends, former lovers, and her partner Chevremont. Shown as desirable beings who know what they want, her models often look directly at the viewer, offering, as poet Claudia Rankine states, “no invitation into their spaces.” Thomas feels, “There’s a greater power and charisma when a woman is aware of her sexual prowess when it is not necessarily about victimization or someone else’s pleasure but her own feeling about her own body and understanding and lov ing herself.” Thomas’ work often starts with photographs of her models in staged, wood-paneled environments, echoing photos of her mother’s house, surrounded by an assortment of decorative,

stylized, and densely patterned fabrics sourced from older fe male relatives. Next, she cuts and reassembles the photographs, creating smaller-scale collages. These images are often recy cled, reused, and transformed across various media. Curator Ed Schad concludes: “She seems to love her subjects, and the com plexities of what love means drive her practice. ... Thomas is an iterative artist, returning to individuals and materials over time. ... [T]here is a baseline consistency to what [she] works with and to whom she commits.” Finally, Thomas adds her signature embellishments, rhine stones, and glitter, calling to the curator’s mind Renée Mussai’s Pointillism, Dot Painting, and Disco, giving her work a “camp chromatic vibrancy and symbolic density.” Along with the sumptuous images in All About Love are Mickalene Thomas’ interview with Rachel Thomas and a range of critical essays on her work. The stylish and seductive works featured in Mickalene Thomas: All About Love began their tour at The Broad in Los Angeles in 2024 and are currently at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia until Jan. 12th, with a final stop at the Hayward Gallery in London later in 2025.

Transitory Artifacts

T RANS HIRSTORY in 99 Objects has been my most popular coffee table book this summer. It has beautiful typography and color plates. It has the heft of art books by Taschen, but it’s published by another German art publisher, Hirmer Verlag, in conjunction with the Museum of Trans Hirtory and Art ( MOTHA ). And it’s the cat alog for an exhibition that has yet to hap

The introductory essays present cut ting-edge historiographical and museo logical analysis in clear, witty, and concise prose. They grapple with questions of who gets presented in museums and the repre sentation of the artists and creators. African-American and feminist critics and curators for decades have struggled to get work by these groups into museums and exhibits. The old excuse, now discredited,

V ERNON R OSARIO

TRANS HIRSTORY IN 99 OBJECTS Edited by David Evans Frantz, Chris ti na Linden, and Chris E. Vargas Hirmer Publishers. 304 pages, $40.

pen! The virtual museum is something of an aspirational institution founded in 2013 by artist Chris E. Vargas. As the clever introductory essays point out, MOTHA exists as a virtual collection awaiting an architectural embodiment. Meanwhile, MOTHA has produced a series of small exhibits at the ONE Na tional Gay & Lesbian Archives (USC), at New York’s New Museum, at the Portland Art Museum, at the Oakland Museum of California, and at university galleries in Seattle, Boston, and Victoria (BC). The catalog’s concept is a parody of two books from “real” museums: the BBC/British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010) and The Smithsonian’s History of Amer ica in 101 Objects (2013).M OTHA ’s “objects” aren’t all objects either. There are the wonderful and captivating artifacts typical of contemporary historical exhibitions: shoes, ceramics, art, magazine and book covers, posters, and ephemera. However, some of the 99 “objects” include significant people and events in trans history. The essays are brief one- to two-page contex tualizations of the items, but also include artistic reactions to the objects as well as interviews with trans figures. Vernon Rosario, a historian of science and a child psychiatrist, is an as sociate clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA. January–February 2025

was that “There are no great women artists!” However, the less visible trait of sexual orientation continues to be over looked, as artists are essentially thrown back in the closet when wall text fails to mention their LGBT status. Recent mu seum initiatives to address “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” have led to major progress in what artists and works make it into museums. Vargas nevertheless also highlights institutional tokenism or cooptation of anticapitalist, antiracist, and post colonial critiques of museums. (An example of this would be the obligatory “Black History” offering in February.) Christina Liden’s essay is also theoretically savvy, yet approachable, displaying her communication skills as Director of Academic and Public Programs at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She explores thorny questions of representation: What counts as an “object”? Who is “trans” (especially when “transgender” is only a century-old term)? Most challenging of all is how to represent absence : people or events that have been historically and culturally ignored, suppressed, or vio lently eliminated. The three editors and curators lay out a thought-provoking matrix for this virtual collection of trans hir story objects of which I can mention only a tantalizing few. Physical objects in clude the transgender pride flag designed in 1999 by Monica

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