Interior: Fireplace with Blackbird
Not on view
This complex print, based on a collaged painting Thomas created in 2012, depicts a 1970s-era living room that Thomas encountered in The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement (1970), an eighteen-volume set that instructed readers in the design and care of domestic spaces. She based the composition on one of the book's color photographs and added her own imagery, colors, and various textures. Thomas also fractured the picture plane and altered its perspective by inserting collage fragments of brightly colored patterns, emphasizing the work's synthetic quality and creating unconventional spatial relationships. Though the interior does not show or imply actual habitation by people or families, Thomas links it to her portraiture practice as a room that could be representative of a personality as it projects beauty, power, or elegance via its interior design components.Karin Breuer
- Artist
- Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971)
- Publisher
- Durham Press, Inc.
- Title
- Interior: Fireplace with Blackbird
- Date
- 2016
- Object Type
- Prints
- Medium
- Color screenprint with collage of inkjet prints, woodcut print, flocked paper, wood veneer and etching
- Dimensions
- 42 3/8 x 34 1/4 in. (107.6 x 87 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Endowment Fund
- Accession Number
- 2018.59.1