MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady?, an exhibition opening Oct. 16 of new and recent work by New York–based artist Mickalene Thomas.

For this exhibition, Thomas has created a group of silkscreened portraits to be featured alongside an installation inspired by 1970s domestic interiors, and a two-channel video that weaves together a chorus of black female performers, past and present, including standup comedians Jackie “Moms” Mabley and Wanda Sykes, and pop-culture icons Eartha Kitt and Whitney Houston.

An incisive, moving, and at times riotous portrait of the multiplicities of womanhood, Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady? builds upon Thomas’s ongoing reconsideration of black female identity, presentation, and representation through a queer lens. This exhibition is organized by MOCA Curatorial Assistant Rebecca Matalon, with Executive Assistant to the Chief Curator Hana Cohn.

Over the last decade, Thomas has produced sumptuous, ecstatic, and excessively tactile paintings, photographs, collages, films, and installations. The surfaces of her unabashedly decorative and vibrantly colored paintings of interiors and landscapes are often overlaid with rhinestones, applied as contour or in lavish, all-over fields. Thomas plays with perspective, layering fractured geometric shapes that reference the early cubist compositions of Romare Bearden. In her signature painted and photographic portraits of family, friends, lovers, and pop-culture icons, Thomas draws on and deconstructs 19th- and 20th-century traditions of portraiture, replacing the ubiquitous white female nude with voluptuous African American women.

Rather than being objects of a spectator’s gaze, Thomas’s women look back. They are self-possessed, socially and sexually empowered. Often draped in richly hued swaths of fabric, they pose with arms and legs extended atop sofas embellished with layers of animal prints, oversized flowers, and checkerboard patterns. Thomas’s eroticism emerges via the décor of these lush scenes, set in densely furnished living rooms accented with patchwork fabrics, wood paneling, kitsch wallpaper, and animal skin rugs to recall 1970s domestic interiors. More recently, she has begun transforming these backdrops into immersive installations, creating three-dimensional tableaux that humorously riff on the museological tradition of the period room.

Rich with allusion, Thomas’s environments also build upon and expand her interest in how private domestic spaces function as sites of selffashioning and display, and how class and taste are embedded in the objects we choose to surround ourselves with.

Mickalene Thomas was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971. She received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2000 and her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2002. She has held a number of prestigious residencies, including the Studio Museum in Harlem (2002–03) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013). Her vast body of work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2011); the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2012); the Brooklyn Museum (2012–13); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012–13); and, most recently, the Aperture Foundation, New York (2015–16) and the Aspen Art Museum (2016). Thomas has produced site-specific projects for the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal (2016); the Queens Museum, New York (2015); Volkshaus at Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2013); Barclays Center, New York (2012); and MoMA P.S. 1, New York (2010).

Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.