COVER: Mickalene Thomas / W Magazine / January 2013

Hollywood's "It" actress Jessica Chastain plays muse to artist Mickalene Thomas 

Excerpt:

MICKALENE THOMAS:

“What’s always intriguing to me is transforming my subjects into a character from another era,” says Mickalene Thomas, whose rhinestone-embellished collage paintings, photographs, and installations have regularly given African-American women a starring role. Posed as reclining odalisques, 1970s divas, and bold nudes, they express Thomas’s fascination with female power and stereotypes of black femininity. For this portfolio, Thomas photographed Chastain in one of the ’70s-inspired domestic interiors she had constructed for her recent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. She created “a performance inside a finished work of art” by instructing Chastain to “wait for your man to come home so you can seduce him.” Though Donna Summer blared from a record player and the set was reminiscent of the disco era, Thomas said her references ranged from portraits by Balthus and Edouard Manet to scenes from the 1983 film Scarface. She asked Chastain to channel her own version of the drug kingpin’s moll in that film (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) and had her blinged out from wig to toe in shimmering shades of gold. “I tend to gravitate toward characters who have a razor-sharp edge,” Thomas says. “I saw Jessica’s character as a woman who has conquered her environment. There’s a sense of triumph.” Throughout her career, the artist, who is African-American, has mostly painted “those closest to me—my friends and family,” but she insists that her choice of subject is not contingent on ethnicity. “I’m interested in their energy and the look in their eyes and the confidence they convey. It’s about the essence of their prowess.”

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