Mickalene Thomas — All About Love — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 22 days: December 17, 2025 → April 5, 2026

Mickalene Thomas, the first African-American artist to be honored with a major solo exhibition at the Grand Palais, presents All About Love: a vibrant retrospective exploring the visibility and representation of Black women and celebrating love as a force of liberation, self-affirmation, and joy.

All About Love is a monographic exhibition by the American artist Mickalene Thomas (born 1971, New York), internationally recognized for her bold and multidimensional practice. She explores the representation of Black women in art, history, and popular culture, reimagining classical portraiture through a queer and Black feminist lens.
The retrospective spans more than two decades of creation, blending painting, collage, photography, video, and installation. At the heart of her work, love emerges as a force of liberation, joy, and self-assertion, a theme inspired by bell hooks’s foundational book All About Love: New Visions (1999).

Thomas’s works pay tribute to the agency, beauty, and resilience of Black women. Her subjects — friends, family, lovers, and cultural icons — are depicted with confidence, sensuality, and grace, reclaiming spaces from which they have historically been excluded. Her compositions, often studded with rhinestones, invite viewers into worlds where pleasure becomes political and representation becomes radical.

Thomas also engages in dialogue with European, particularly French, art history. Iconic works such as Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) are reinterpreted through a contemporary prism, placing Black women at the center of the narrative and transforming the reading of classical paintings.

All About Love invites audiences to enter a universe of love, leisure, and liberation, where beauty, intimacy, and self-possession redefine the art-historical gaze.
After acclaimed exhibitions at The Broad (Los Angeles), The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Hayward Gallery (London), and Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), this retrospective represents the most ambitious presentation of Mickalene Thomas’s work in Paris.

Curated by Rachel Thomas (Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery), Lauriane Gricourt (Director of Les Abattoirs, Toulouse), and Erin Gilbert (independent curator).
Scenography by Nicolas Groult and Valentina Dodi.