RECLAIMING SPACE: MICKALENE THOMAS’S A MOMENT’S PLEASURE

Mickalene Thomas (1971- ) is best known for her bejeweled two-dimensional paintings of fabulous Black women lounging in 1970s interiors. In 2019 the Baltimore Museum of Art commissioned her to create a site-specific installation, which enabled Thomas to expand her interest in the 1970s interior into three dimensions. The exhibition title, A Moment’s Pleasure, used wallpaper, carpets, furniture, and the work of underrepresented artists, to transform the lobby of the museum into a collage-like space evocative of the pivotal era. This project investigates Thomas’s investment in the politics of space—both the living rooms that the piece represents, and the museum in which A Moment’s Pleasure was displayed. Through the living room, Thomas honored the personal, private lives of radical Black queer women in the 1970s and offered a corrective to the memory of a decade so often defined by hyper-masculine constructions of Blackness. This type of intervention is distinctly meaningful in the historically exclusionary environment of the art museum; thus, A Moment’s Pleasure posited a new form of institutional critique. Rather than use objects to address the museum’s historical exclusions, as Fred Wilson had previously done in Baltimore, Thomas consciously and conscientiously invited local audiences to use the BMA as a site of dialogue and exchange. In 2020 long-brewing racial tensions exploded over the murder of George Floyd during the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, Thomas designed two Black Lives Matter-inspired banners to hang from the façade of the museum. Though the museum doors were temporarily shut, the banners underscored the urgency of Thomas’s intervention inside.