Mickalene Thomas Boldly Imagines the Interior Lives of 19th-Century Black Sitters—and Brings Them into the Present

At the center of Yale University Art Gallery’s current exhibition is an object of small stature but outsize historical importance. Measuring four by three inches, the 19th-century miniature depicts an older Black woman named Rose Prentice. (ARTnews will subsequently identify the sitter simply as Rose, so as not to repeat her former enslaver’s name and instead use the name ostensibly given to her by her mother.) Sometime around 1837–38, Boston-based miniaturist Sarah Goodridge rendered Rose with great technical skill and attention to detail: seen from the waist up against a nondescript background, she wears a printed cotton dress accented by a crisp white ruffled collar, a patterned headwrap, and pearl earrings. The watercolor-on-ivory portrait rests within a gilded frame inlaid into a small leatherbound, wooden case lined in velvet. Meant to be held in the palm of a hand, the portrait appears to demonstrate that the receiver or commissioner of this work cherished Rose deeply. But beneath those details there lies a hint of exhaustion—and perhaps resignation—evident in Rose’s eyes. Even without knowing the circumstances of the work’s creation, it’s clear that Rose had witnessed a lot in her life. 

YUAG acquired the portrait in 2016 from Caroline Phillips, a descendant from the matriarchal line of the Tucker family, who had enslaved (and later manumitted) Rose; she remained employed by the family until her death, around 1852. In the accompanying exhibition catalogue, YUAG curator Keely Orgeman suggests that Eliza Tucker MacGregor, a daughter in the family whom Rose raised (perhaps alongside her own son, Leonard), likely commissioned the portrait to keep as a memento of Rose when Eliza left New England for New York City as an adult. Given this history, all that was initially known about Rose came from Tucker MacGregor’s descendants. And, while it is remarkable to know anything about a formerly enslaved woman, curator Key Jo Lee, who wrote about the miniature in 2017, reminds us that “[d]espite any hopeful desire to see Rose’s story as ultimately triumphant, this narrative is complicated by her silence.” This tension—between the interiority of a Black woman tenderly captured by Goodridge and the weight carried in the image—complicates our understanding of the relationship between portraiture and slavery.

The complexities and contradictions presented by this work are decidedly foregrounded in “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” co-curated by Orgeman and artist Mickalene Thomas. The exhibition borrows its title from a line in scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s essay collection The Black Interior, in which Alexander discusses Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”—a 1963 poem about an “eminent fop” insightfully described via an inspection of “the innards” of his closet—as a “portrait of an unlikely space.” Alexander offers Brooks’s work as a prime example of her text’s underlying query: “What do we learn when we pause at sites of contradiction where black creativity complicates and resists what blackness is ‘supposed’ to be?”

Featuring 45 artworks, the exhibition, which is on view until January 7, pairs historic objects and contemporary works. Small 19th-century portraits (painted miniatures, daguerreotypes, tintypes, silhouettes, and prints) featuring Black sitters—some known, some unknown, some free(d), some enslaved—make up an imagined community, in Thomas’s words a “chosen family,” in the exhibition space. These are joined by 20th- and 21st-century pieces by the likes of Lebohang Kganye, Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Wardell Milan II, Devin N. Morris, Adia Millett, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, and Betye Saar. The curators chose the contemporary works to expand upon notions of “domesticity, family, interiority, intimacy, and ownership that existed under slavery and continue to affect our lives today,” as Thomas writes in her catalogue essay.

The show consists of four sections—“Solitude,” “Togetherness,” “Posing,” and finally “Holding”—that each embody domestic spaces, specifically the living rooms, of the 19th-century Black sitters. These sections build on Thomas’s established installation practice, but unlike her previous funky and vibrant 1970s-inspired interiors decked out with bright colors, lush fabrics, and bedazzled surfaces, “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” presents somber and restrained spaces that conjure the charged climate of antebellum era and speak to the importance of having access to spaces of respite. Several of the gallery walls are painted blue-gray or dark-brown, the latter of which is based on Thomas’s own skin tone, suggesting the artist’s physical embrace of these sitters. Other walls feature an African-inspired wallpaper designed by Thomas.

At the center of one gallery, atop stately emerald-green rugs, are high-back armchairs that have been upholstered with various patterned fabrics, a mixture of delicate floral prints and bold diasporic ones inspired by the textiles crafted and worn by Black women on both sides of the Atlantic. The low lighting in certain galleries, used to protect the light-sensitive historical objects, also lends a melancholic mood to the exhibition.

In the “Holding” section is a daguerreotype of a young Black man cradling a carpenter’s triangle. Because the curators have opted to go without wall texts, it’s only upon stepping out of the low-light gallery that visitors will learn that this elegantly posed man is Haywood Dixon, who was enslaved at the time his portrait was taken. Like Rose, Haywood did not commission his own portrait. Moreover, it was likely created to surveil and regulate his movements in the event that he ever fled enslavement.

The exhibition’s dialogue between images depicting 19th-century sitters and work by contemporary artists enacts Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “critical fabulation,” or an imagining of “what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” by people—Black women, especially—whose voices have been purposefully obscured in historical records. Though this process, Hartman constructs alternative narratives that reveal the past as intwined with the present and allow for better futures.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s Consecration to Mary (2021–23), for example, re-narrates the story of an unnamed Black girl (perhaps as young as five or six years old) who was photographed nude on a couch in 1882 by the acclaimed (and now defamed) Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. In her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman meditates on the same photo, notinghow the photo “makes it impossible for her to be a child”; when reproducing the image, Hartman covered the girl’s exposed body with text as a way to mediate the violence perpetuated by Eakins.

In her artistic intervention, which mimics the pocketbook format of the other 19th-century daguerreotypes and miniatures in the exhibition, Baxter inserts herself into the scene, and gives the young girl a name, Mary. In one daguerreotype, she covers Mary’s body with a blanket, and in another, the artist tenderly embraces the girl, who is now positioned away from the camera and Eakins’s gaze. Instead, Baxter confronts us with her own unflinching gaze. In making photographic copies of the original daguerreotype, Baxter further refuses to replicate poisonous practices, as daguerreotypes were processed using toxic levels of mercury. Additionally, the complex technology of the daguerreotype references, as Baxter told ARTnews, “the inability for children to have the language to understand, talk, and process the violation.” In one final act, the third photograph in the series is a school photo of Baxter, implicating the artist’s experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The exhibition closes with Imitation of Life, a 1975 assemblage pieceby Betye Saar that features a Mammy figurine set within an upright box with an open lid, onto which Saar has drawn a Black woman sitting with a child in her lap. Behind the figurine, who holds a grenade, is a newspaper advertisement for “a valuable Negro woman, accustomed to all kinds of house work,” who the ad notes would be sold separately from her four children. This final work brings us back to the first: Rose noted in her will that she did not know the whereabouts of her son Leonard, whose fate remains unknown to researchers today.

It is through these specific juxtapositions, of the historical with the contemporary, that we see the explosive potential of art in helping to reframe our understanding of the past. While Rose’s portrait is a stunning work of art and its backstory serves as a moving tale of interracial affection, the exhibition repeatedly reminds us that we can never know how Rose felt about the fact that her former enslavers wanted to keep a piece of her—even after she moved on. Engaging with Black American history—much like acknowledging and living with the difficulties faced by Black people today—can be an arduous task that requires a great deal of care, work, and purpose. But in placing history at the center of our present, an exhibition like “Portrait of an Unlikely Space” asks us to sit with the beauty and the pain.

Correction, December 29, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated which Gwendolyn Brooks poem Elizabeth Alexander discusses when she writes about a “portrait of an unlikely space.” It is “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” not “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat.”