Photo By Gail

Katherine Dunham: Revelation (2024), a newly created work by Mickalene Thomas, is an homage to Katherine Dunham, a choreographer who held a doctorate in anthropology, known to Alvin Ailey and many others as the matriarch of Black dance.

Drawing from both art history and popular culture, Thomas often juxtaposes histories, mediums, and materials to center the presence of Black women. Her scintillating surfaces are collaged – with a treatment at once graphic, archival, and staged– and adorned with sequins, rhinestones, and other embellishments, as seen in the above detail shot.

Photographed as part of Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum in New York City.