Mickalene Thomas Faces Copyright Lawsuit Over Photographs Used in Museum Works
Photographer Barbara Karant has sued Mickalene Thomas, alleging that the artist used images from Karant’s “820 Ebony/Jet” series without permission or attribution in works shown at museums and blue-chip galleries. The complaint, filed last month in Illinois’s North District Court, says Thomas appropriated more than a dozen photographs from Karant’s body of work and incorporated them into installations and collages presented over several years.
Karant’s series, completed in 2015, consists of 250 photographs made inside the former headquarters of Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago. The building once housed the publications Ebony and Jet, and its interiors have become a charged site for artists and historians interested in Black media, representation, and institutional memory. Karant began photographing the space in 2013, one year after the company vacated the building, and her images focus on empty hallways, offices, and lobbies marked by traces of past use.
The lawsuit says the disputed images appeared in a 2021 exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York and in “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” the 2024 survey that opened at the Broad museum in Los Angeles before traveling to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Hayward Gallery in London, and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France. In that survey, Karant’s photographs of a Johnson Publishing Company floor served as backdrops for Thomas’s collaged paintings.
The filing also names Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Yancey Richardson, Kavi Gupta, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia as defendants. It argues that the copying was “unauthorized and without attribution,” while noting that Thomas’s exhibition materials did not identify Karant. Thomas did not respond to a request for comment, and a lawyer for Karant declined to comment further.
The dispute lands at a moment when Thomas’s work remains widely visible in museums and galleries, even as she faces a separate lawsuit from former partner Racquel Chevremont. For now, the case raises a familiar but unresolved question in contemporary art: where does appropriation end and infringement begin?
