Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at the Grand Palais
The Art Lens is Dandelion Chandelier’s ongoing series on art and visual culture, exploring how artists, exhibitions, and artworks shape perception, memory, and meaning beyond trend.
Mickalene Thomas’s All About Love at the Grand Palais is one of the most generous, intelligent, and visually satisfying exhibitions in Paris right now. On view through April 5, 2026, the show brings together painting, collage, photography, video, and installation to make an argument Thomas has been building for years: Black women, so often overlooked, misread, or reduced, belong at the center of the gaze. What the exhibition adds is scale, range, and emotional breadth. Even for a collector of Thomas’s work, it is a revelation. I own two of her works, and still came away with a wider sense of her ambition than I had before.
At a glance: December 17, 2025–April 5, 2026 • Grand Palais, Paris • painting + collage + photography + video + installation • Mickalene Thomas across two levels • Black women as the protagonists of their own image
she was never background
There are artists whose work arrives already carrying a shorthand. With Mickalene Thomas, that shorthand is often glamour: rhinestones, interiors, pattern, beauty, the lush surface charge of femininity rendered at full volume. This exhibition complicates that instantly. The color is rich, yes, and often simply beautiful. The women are sensual, yes, and unmistakably strong. But the real force of the show lies in something deeper: Thomas is not just making beautiful images of Black women. She is reorganizing who gets to be looked at, how they are looked at, and what kinds of complexity beauty can hold.
What to look for: the two-level installation, the monumental scale, the shift from frontal viewing to overhead perspective, the houseplant installation, the dialogue with bell hooks and James Baldwin, and the way Thomas turns beauty into structure rather than ornament.
This review is based on a firsthand visit to the exhibition and informed by the writer’s experience as a collector of Mickalene Thomas’s work. All photographs were taken by the author in Paris in March 2026.
when a show knows exactly who its heroine is
The curator has done very well by Thomas. The exhibition is spacious, comprehensive, and unusually confident in the work’s ability to hold a room.
That matters because Thomas’s art needs space. The works are often monumental in scale, and the exhibition unfolds across two levels, allowing the viewer to encounter many of them first at eye level and then again from above. That second look changes the work. Pattern becomes structure. Surface becomes architecture. The compositions reveal how rigorously they are built. What can initially read as seduction begins to read as command.
Beauty, not behaving itself.
The survey also does something that strong retrospectives should do but often do not: it expands the viewer’s sense of the artist. Thomas is widely known for large-scale portraits and rhinestone-studded, collage-based paintings, but this exhibition makes clear that her practice is much wider than many viewers, even committed admirers, may realize. Video is here. Photography is here. Installation is here. Early work and later work are here, in enough depth to show development without forcing a simplistic before-and-after story.
the women take the room
The hero of this exhibition is the Black woman in all her complexity.
That sounds obvious, perhaps, because Thomas’s work has said this for years. But All About Love gives the point scale and consequence. Women who have historically been marginalized, stylized by others, or treated as supporting figures become the subjects around whom the whole visual world is organized. They are not incidental. ot illustrative. They are the center of the gaze.
The women take the room.
This is one of the reasons the exhibition feels so emotionally satisfying. The women in Thomas’s work are not flattened into virtue or defiance. They are self-possessed, sensuous, interior, glamorous, vulnerable, decorative, intellectual, playful, and utterly aware of being seen. Thomas does not ask femininity to apologize for itself in order to be taken seriously. She lets prettiness, glamour, softness, and strength coexist, and in doing so makes them more potent, not less.
beauty with force behind it
One of the quiet achievements of the show is how fully it restores depth to Thomas’s color.
Pretty, and not even remotely harmless.
It would be easy to call the palette lush, saturated, or jewel-like and leave it there. The colors are all of those things. But what the exhibition makes especially clear is that their beauty is not superficial. Thomas’s colors have weight behind them. They do emotional and structural work. They seduce, certainly, but they also anchor. Create dignity. Make atmosphere. And build an environment in which Black femininity is not peripheral, but architectonic.
This is where the exhibition becomes especially rewarding in person. The colors are, straightforwardly, pretty in many cases. Thomas is unafraid of the power of beauty. But the prettiness never curdles into decoration for its own sake. It remains tethered to history, citation, self-fashioning, and power. That is a much rarer achievement than it sounds.
And if you’re thinking about how beauty operates as language rather than decoration, it connects directly to the ideas explored in This is Not Search, It’s Editing, where taste becomes a form of judgment rather than just preference.
more than a painter, more than a muse
One of the pleasures of the show is discovering how much wider Thomas’s practice is than many viewers may have realized.
The surprise of the exhibition is range: video, installation, photography, and environment widen Thomas from painter to polymath.
She builds worlds.
Even as someone who collects her work, I came away understanding her range as an artist far more than I had understood before. Painting and collage are central, of course, but the videos and installations widen the terms of the exhibition beautifully. They make clear that Thomas is not simply composing portraits. She is building worlds. She thinks in images, yes, but also in rooms, textures, sequences, environments, and emotional registers.
Another register entirely.
That breadth matters because it shifts Thomas from being a painter with a signature style to something more ambitious: an artist who can move fluidly among mediums while keeping her central concerns intact. The exhibition does not feel like a display of versatility for its own sake. It feels like an artist using every available form to expand the same larger argument about love, visibility, desire, memory, and representation.
the plants, the patterns, the surprise
One of the exhibition’s most unexpected pleasures is an installation of roughly 150 houseplants.
The plants were a plot twist.
It is not what many viewers will come expecting from Mickalene Thomas, and that is precisely why it matters. The installation widens the emotional and aesthetic field of the show. It introduces a different kind of domesticity, a different kind of abundance, and a more environmental sense of portraiture — as if the ecosystem around the subject also deserves attention. It reminded me, inevitably, of Rashid Johnson, not because the two artists are doing the same thing, but because both understand how plants can operate as cultural material, atmosphere, and psychological architecture.
What surprised me most was not simply that Thomas made something like this, but that it fit so naturally within the larger exhibition. By the time one reaches it, the logic is clear. Thomas is not only interested in figures. She is interested in the world that makes those figures legible, held, and alive.
The prettiness here is real, but it is never shallow; beauty is one of the show’s instruments of force.
when glamour stops playing nice
One of the most compelling things about All About Love is that it refuses the stale opposition between seriousness and sensuality.
Thomas’s women are sensual. The exhibition does not deny that; it insists on it. But sensuality here is not code for passivity, nor is beauty a trap. The women in these works possess themselves too fully for that. Their glamour is not submission to a gaze; it is control over one. The works understand that femininity can be strategic, lush, theatrical, erotic, composed, and intellectually forceful all at once.
Sensuality, without apology.
This is one place where the exhibition’s intellectual frame matters. The title comes from bell hooks, and the show also features quotations from bell hooks and James Baldwin. Like Thomas herself, both were Black, queer, and absolutely fearless. That pairing feels exactly right here. The exhibition understands love not as sentimentality, but as an act of recognition, care, resistance, and imaginative repair.
Like bell hooks and James Baldwin, Thomas treats love not as softness, but as a force of recognition.
This is also one place where the show speaks unexpectedly well to the Matisse exhibition running concurrently in the same building. Seen together, the two exhibitions make a surprisingly elegant pair: across time, both insist on the seriousness of sensuality.
what scale lets you understand
The exhibition’s scale is not just impressive. It is interpretive.
Because the works are monumental and the show unfolds over two levels, the viewer has the chance to encounter many of them twice — first frontally, then from above. That shift in angle is unusually revealing. It lets you see how carefully Thomas constructs her surfaces, how pattern and collage hold a figure in place, how an image that first reads as glamorous can, on second look, reveal its compositional intelligence. The show trusts duration and repetition. It asks you to look once, then look again.
Look once, then from above.
That is part of what makes the exhibition feel so satisfying. It does not merely present Thomas’s work as culturally important, though it is. It presents it as visually intelligent on a grand scale. The installation allows the work’s ambition to register fully.
love as structure, not sentiment
The title, borrowed from bell hooks, could easily have been used sentimentally. It is not.
Love here is not softness without structure. It is a force of recognition, liberation, and self-definition. The exhibition frames love as something expansive enough to contain memory, politics, desire, grief, reverence, and joy. That is why the show feels broader than a survey of a single artist’s achievements. It feels like an argument about who deserves to be centered, cherished, and seen in full.
That is also why the exhibition lingers. You leave with specific works in mind, yes, but also with a changed sense of what Thomas is doing. She is not only making images of Black women. She is building a visual philosophy in which Black women are the authors, atmosphere, and intelligence of the world on view.
what stays after the shimmer
What stayed with me most was not a single work, though there are many candidates. It was the cumulative effect of being in the presence of so much scale, color, sensuality, and care without once feeling that the show had narrowed its subjects into symbols.
Love, citation, memory, method.
That is a real achievement. Many exhibitions about representation grow didactic or reductive. This one does not. It remains generous to complexity. And allows beauty to remain beauty. It allows power to remain intimate. And allows femininity to be pretty and profound at once.
And it leaves one final realization: Thomas’s range is wider than many people know. Wider, frankly, than I knew — and I live with her work. That is one of the best reasons to see a major survey. Not to have your admiration confirmed, but to have it enlarged.
If you’re wondering how to carry this level of discernment into your own decisions, Vale exists for exactly that — not to search, but to edit.
sources + further reading.
- Grand Palais — Mickalene Thomas, All About Love
- Grand Palais magazine — Mickalene Thomas at the Grand Palais: an ode to love and Black beauty
- Vogue — Mickalene Thomas’s New Survey at the Grand Palais Is for Lovers
- Kavi Gupta — Mickalene Thomas: All About Love | Grand Palais
- ArtsHebdoMédias — from Baldwin to bell hooks with Mickalene Thomas
faqs: mickalene thomas: all about love at the grand palais
what is mickalene thomas’s all about love at the grand palais about?
It is a major survey of Mickalene Thomas’s work across painting, collage, photography, video, and installation. The exhibition centers Black women as the protagonists of their own image and explores love, sensuality, representation, and power through a distinctly Black feminist and queer lens.
when is all about love at the grand palais?
The exhibition runs from December 17, 2025 through April 5, 2026 at the Grand Palais in Paris.
is the mickalene thomas exhibition worth seeing?
Very much so. It is spacious, visually rich, and more comprehensive than many viewers may expect, especially in the way it reveals Thomas’s range across multiple media and at monumental scale.
what makes the exhibition distinctive?
Its combination of scale, beauty, and conceptual clarity. The show allows viewers to see Thomas’s work across two levels, includes video and installation alongside painting and collage, and insists on the complexity of Black femininity without flattening it into a single message.
why are bell hooks and james baldwin relevant to this exhibition?
The title comes from bell hooks’s All About Love, and the exhibition’s use of quotes from hooks and Baldwin sharpens its moral and emotional frame. Together, they help position the show as one about love not as sentiment, but as political, cultural, and intimate force.
