The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a special project entitled Mickalene Thomas--Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two, to be carried out by the artist Mickalene Thomas in Gallery I of the museum.

Based in New York, Mickalene Thomas (born in 1971) has become widely known for her portrait paintings done in vivid colors and rhinestones. For 10 months, from March 2010, work that she did for The Museum of Modern Art, New York was installed in a show window on 53rd Street, propelling her into the limelight. Thomas received a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in 2000 and an M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 2002. Her present work consists of photographs, collages, videos and large-scale paintings. African-American women appear as models in her works, which are strongly informed by the artist’s own identity as an African-American. In these works, boldly rendered women strike poses that are at once dignified and provocative, and are highly suggestive of the Blaxploitation imagery that was popular in America in the 1970s.

This project was first conceived of after the museum acquired the painting Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two, which features the artist’s mother as the model. During the project, a part of the stage setting in her New York studio will be reproduced as an installation, allowing viewers to understand the artist’s approach to her subject matter and her creative process. The large-format painting, whose composition is reminiscent of the famous painting by Ingres, Odalisque, shows a nude woman, who is Sandra, the artist’s own mother and “No. 1 muse.” By painting her mother, the artist believed she might close the gap that had grown between mother and daughter. Thus was born this and other paintings with her mother as the model. The group of paintings selected for this project, including work paired with DVD imagery, may be considered a starting point for an artist whose work addresses such varied issues as race and gender.

The artist is scheduled to come to Japan for this project and will give lectures in association with Black History Month (note), an event organized by the U.S. Embassy, Tokyo. At the Hara Museum (Tokyo), she is scheduled to give a talk on Thursday, February 17. The artist’s work will also be featured at the highly renowned contemporary art fair G Tokyo 2011 which will be held from Saturday, February 19.