Cameron Granger on Mickalene Thomas, mothers, and being seen

Hundreds of miles and a handful of years away from where I am now, I’m 12 years old, lying beside my mother on her bed. We would often hold court like this, sometimes watching any and every cartoon, other times watching any and every reality show. The TV was off this time, though, and the only real sound came from her ceiling fan, which would squeak just a tiny bit between every breath either one of us would take.

“What do you think of Byron?”

My mother didn’t really date, at least not from what I could see at the time. She rarely let men into our home, and when she did, I knew it was serious, even as young as I was. Byron had been coming around a lot now. I liked him. He had a Playstation 2, a loud laugh, and very big shoes.  

“He’s cool ... I guess.”

I guess my mother was being unusually hesitant tonight with her words. I guess I never noticed. 

“How would you feel if he was your new dad?”

I think this is where I tell you that my heart dropped, and tears began running down my face like a switch had just been flipped, and I couldn’t bring myself to say a single word in the wake of it all, and I think my mother cried too, but that I can’t seem to remember it. 

What I do remember is leaving my mother’s room, and how on the way to my room, I saw Byron’s shoes, on the floor, at the foot of our couch, waiting for his return.

Not far from the video of Mama Bush that beckoned me inward, a pair of black heels lie atop a small rug, draped over a lush blue carpet. A smaller scene inside of a larger one, contained by a living room. I imagine the owner slipping them off after a long day at work, or kicking them to the side right before running into their lover’s arms after dreaming all day about doing just that.

Throughout the show Mickalene creates these tableaus from the spaces that have helped shape her. Her mother’s home, a living space shared with an old partner, we all have spaces like these carved into the corners of our own memory. I look at Mickalene’s own memories made physical through these works, and I begin to recall my own. 

I wonder if that’s what she wanted. 

This is the part where I should speak on the subjects of Mickalene’s works beyond her mother, various Black, often Queer women that have come in and out of her life, and how the way in which she positions them within the work draws from and subverts a long, Eurocentric history that often (i.e. always) finds them on the margins, and how Mickalene making this work on the level that she is, is in itself a radical act.

I see these works though, and think of how I watch them, watching me, and how their gaze shoots out from the painting and wraps around the gallery, and then around me too in a way that yes, can maybe feel confrontational if it’s one that you aren’t used to, but one that for me feels much more familiar.

I guess I’m thinking of the time I first came home after I first left home, and how tightly my mother wrapped her arms around me when I walked through the door. I’m thinking about the way she looked at me in that moment. It was an affirming gaze, one that made me feel seen in a way that I hadn’t in a very long time. And maybe it was the gaze that she always looked upon me with, but I was too close to notice before.

The eyes in Mickalene’s work do something similar I think. Eyes that say, “Yes, I see you, now it’s time for you to see me.” I look at these works and not only see the Black women in the painting before me, but all of the Black women who, like them, have given me the gift of their sight.

Oh what a gift it is to be seen.