US artist Mickalene Thomas shines light on black women’s plight in first Hong Kong show

Mickalene Thomas is angry. The American artist, in Hong Kong for her first solo exhibition in the city at Lehmann Maupin, has just heard that the mayor of a predominantly white town in West Virginia publicly applauded someone’s particularly loathsome description of Michelle Obama. A county official from the town of Clay had called the first lady an “ape in heels” on Facebook and Beverly Whaling, the white mayor, responded with a gleeful, “Just made my day”.

“It ignited a fire in me and churned something in my soul,” Thomas says.

For someone who is a minority twice over – Thomas is an African American artist who is also a lesbian – such deep-seated prejudice among unapologetic white supremacists is infuriating, but not surprising.

“The world has moved forward in many ways, but we have also been blindsided in many ways for thinking that the world has moved forward when it comes to race and femininity. There is a lot of misunderstanding in our country, a lot of issues that have been swept under the carpet,” says Thomas, just a week after the American election was won by a candidate accused of being a racist and a misogynist.

The artist, who made a silkscreen print of Michelle Obama in 2008 (called Michelle O to reference that most glamorous of first ladies, Jackie O) and whose late mother used to regularly sit for her, has long been preoccupied with race and gender issues. She creates prints, paintings, videos that exalt the beauty of black women and place them centre stage, for once, given Western art has historically largely ignored them or denigrated them as servants to the white Olympias.