Contemporary Art

Even Bigger Than Us: Imaginative Portraiture Inspired by Mickalene Thomas

By Sue Liedke, posted on Mar 3, 2026

I explained to students that we’d be making a collaborative painting inspired by the work of Mickalene Thomas, so we first needed to identify some themes. They were quick to determine that Thomas’s paintings feature strong women of color. Maybe they were even… princesses? By showing them some pictures of her work in situ, the scale and scope of her paintings became apparent as well. We were going to need a BIG canvas.

View this article in the digital magazine.


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