Thomas’s assemblage of photographs, paint, and glittering sequins lends sacredness to the struggles of the civil rights movements.
Mickalene Thomas, Guernica (Resist #3), 2021, rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on canvas mounted on wood panel, 210.8 x 274.3 x 5.4 cm (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville) © Mickalene Thomas. Speakers: Dr. Xuxa Rodríguez, former Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, now Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Dr. Beth Harris
[music]
0:00:05.4 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art looking at a large image by Mickalene Thomas called Guernica (Resist #3). This is a difficult image to untangle, but it’s also a difficult image in terms of its subject matter.
0:00:24.9 Dr. Xuxa Rodríguez: We have basically this assemblage of images overlaying, sometimes highlighting each other, sometimes obscuring each other. We also have an overlay of Thomas’s signature use of sequins.
0:00:36.3 Dr. Harris: And the sequins take us to the title of the painting, Guernica, because the lines of the sequins follow the lines of the composition of Picasso’s famous anti-war image of Guernica. Let’s take a moment to go back to 1937, because what this image is asking us to do is to look back at moments in history, this accumulation of violence. So in 1937 the German Nazi government carpet-bombed a Basque town Guernica and killed hundreds of people in this hours long bombing. This was done at the request, or in support, of Franco’s fascist government and Picasso’s commemoration of that, this image that didn’t so much depict the bombing of Guernica, but expressed the horror of that event.
0:01:32.7 Dr. Rodríguez: What’s fascinating here is how Thomas overlays that image of Guernica. She selects a very specific portion, almost a central portion of that larger mural where the horse is screaming out in what appears to be pain. There’s another figure swooping down from outside of the frame. I really love how Thomas treats this like an overlay, almost like a resonance or a ghostly image, as if to suggest that this is still present, violence against innocent people.
0:01:56.0 Dr. Harris: And I think also the way that the work of an artist can help to express the horror of that violence, but also the power of photography to capture moments of violence and help to galvanize civil rights movements.
0:02:12.4 Dr. Rodríguez: That is palpable here. If we just read the painting from left to right, in the top left corner, what Thomas is depicting and highlighting with the light bulb from the Guernica mural is the Little Rock Nine.
0:02:26.1 Dr. Harris: Teens who are going to school because of the end of segregation and who are met with violence.
0:02:31.8 Dr. Rodríguez: Just below that is a police dog ripping the pant legs from a Black man looking down at the dog, almost a mirror image to the image of the horse crying out, except this person continues to push forward. I think it’s important to notice that a lot of these images have that sense of forward mobility. And on the bottom right, we have a collection of folks during the Black Lives Matter protest, one of the shirts saying “I can’t breathe,” which is in reference to 2014 with Eric Garner’s murder. And there’s a quartet at the bottom right, and of the four figures, three are wearing masks. They’re not just referring to COVID and the pandemic, but specifically the uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder, that folks all over the world rose up in resistance.
0:03:11.8 Dr. Rodríguez: We have also the repetition of the image of the solidarity fist, which we’ve seen, not just at demonstrations, but if we go back to the Olympics with Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who demonstrated in protest by lifting up in solidarity with the Black Power movement. Another motif that Thomas includes that could be read in so many ways, are these almost blooms. If we think of a bird’s eye view of a bombing and the ground exploding below, or bullets. For me, it calls up the memorial marker at the Tallahatchie River for Emmett Till and how it’s continually sprayed with bullets. It’s indescribably powerful to stand in front of this image and Thomas’s deft use of the assemblage, the photo collage, the overlay.
0:03:57.8 Dr. Harris: And yet there are moments when we have the hand of the artist, passages where we see her brush strokes.
0:04:03.7 Dr. Rodríguez: The artist has an archival practice of collecting images over time and then making it into an oil painting, also the layering of the sequins, and then her hand coming back with the brush and highlighting different portions of the composition to pay attention to.
0:04:18.8 Dr. Harris: I get flashes of blues and reds and whites from those sequins. They’re this really mundane material that is so evocative and powerful. And also, if I think about the history of art, the way that gold has often been used to indicate the sacred.
0:04:35.6 Dr. Rodríguez: Creating the sense of almost an altarpiece to reflect upon, to meditate upon.
0:04:41.3 Dr. Harris: And perhaps lending some sacredness to the struggles that we see in these images.
0:04:46.0 Dr. Rodríguez: It’s almost like the sacredness of the act of standing up for what’s right.
[music]
