Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, New Jersey) uses the visual language of
1970s Blaxploitation films to reconsider the sexualization of the black woman in popular culture.
Her works are as likely to reference 19th - century painting as
1970s Blaxploitation films.
Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from 19th - century French painting to
1970s Blaxploitation films, Thomas's work attempts to «inject black women into the art historical canon.»
She also looks to
1970s Blaxploitation films and music legends such as Eartha Kitt, Bessie Smith, Sharon Jones, and Billie Holiday also inform Thomas's works.
The grittiness of the crime drama and action, along with the overriding sense of slick style, feels very much like the John Singleton movie, Four Brothers, which also features a menacing villain and retribution storyline lifted right out of
1970s blaxploitation films.
Her subjects seem to have stepped directly from
a 1970s Blaxploitation film, yet Thomas's influences extend far beyond.
The fact that a flashy painting of three black women, who look like they just stepped out of
a 1970S blaxploitation film, could be hanging in the West 53rd Street window of the Museum of Modern Art's eatery astonished the artist.
Not exact matches
1971: This
blaxploitation film is hugely tied to its
1970s New York setting.
The
Blaxploitation films in the
1970s gave black audiences their own heroes: Shaft, Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, Slaughter, Foxy Brown.
The
Blaxploitation films of the
1970s starred relatively unknown black actors playing new kinds of...
This crossover
film, along with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), helped launch the
1970s explosion of the
blaxploitation genre.
By Bob Bloom During the
1970s, when
Blaxploitation films joined the mainstream, filmmakers realized that the urban action
films that dominated the genre had to -LSB-...]
Todd Boyd, professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, pointed to the explosion of
blaxploitation films in the
1970 which were cheap to produce and financial hit.
Friday Foster was the last
film she made for American International Pictures, and in some ways is the apotheosis of the entire early
1970s «
blaxploitation» genre.
Inspired by
Blaxploitation, the
1970s film genre that includes «Foxy Brown» and «Shaft,» her pieces capture the sassy attitude of the era.
His 2010 wall painting Credit Roll reproduced the names of
blaxploitation films of the
1970s in white text over brown paint.
Photographic enlargements capture both conscious and unconscious deviations from cultural, social, racial, and gender expectations from the silent era through the
Blaxploitation films of the
1970s.
From Birth of a Nation in the early 1900s to the «
Blaxploitation»
films of the
1970s, Black women were type - casted as carnal and promiscuous, often as prostitutes or «jezebels.»
Chris Ofili is renowned internationally for his richly layered works that combine imagery and influences from sources as divergent as comic books, hiphop, Zimbabwean cave paintings, Biblical scenes, and
1970s - era
Blaxploitation films.