In 2011, BOMB Magazine described Mickalene Thomas’s work as “the perfect epilogue to the polemic raised in Weems’s Mirror, Mirror.” The work in question, created by Carrie Mae Weems in 1987, shows a Black woman gazing into a mirror, an ironic reference to the age-old fairy tale Snow White. Thomas, who was born in New Jersey in 1971, first encountered Mirror, Mirror and Weems’s oeuvre at age 23. In the 1990s, she began creating her own work, taking inspiration from Weems and Romare Bearden as well as Matisse, Cubism, and Yoruban art. Her large-scale multi-media tableaux depict Black women adorned with rhinestones, lounging on settees, beds, and couches. Thomas’s subjects return our gaze, inviting us into their imaginative, playful, and sensual space. —Paulina Prosnitz