Jack Shainman Gallery Adds Mickalene Thomas, With Solo Show Set for 2028
Jack Shainman Gallery will now represent American artist Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), whose rhinestone-studded portraits of Black women have become among the most recognizable images in contemporary art. The gallery said Thomas will mount a solo exhibition there in January 2028, while continuing to work with Yancey Richardson in New York, Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, and Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado.
The move formalizes a relationship that has stretched back to the early years of Thomas’s career. In a recent interview, she said she had known Jack Shainman for years and described their first studio meeting as unusually formative, adding that she had long felt treated like one of his artists even before joining the gallery. Shainman’s program, she said, is defined by ambitious spaces and a willingness to challenge artists to think at scale.
Thomas’s practice has long centered on race, queerness, femininity, and beauty, drawing from art history, popular culture, and African textiles. Since receiving her MFA from Yale in 2002, she has worked across painting, photography, collage, video, and installation, building a body of work that moves easily between glamour and critique.
Her institutional profile is equally broad. Thomas’s work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among others. Her first major internationally touring exhibition, “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” opened at the Broad in Los Angeles in 2024, co-organized with the Hayward Gallery in London and presented in partnership with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
The gallery addition also arrives at a moment of sustained market strength. Thomas was named one of Time Magazine’s Most Influential People in 2025, the same year she had a solo show at the Grand Palais in Paris. Her auction record stands at $1.8 million for “Racquel Reclining Wearing Purple Jumpsuit” (2016), and at least 13 of her works have sold for more than $500,000 since 2019.
For Jack Shainman Gallery, which has built a roster that includes El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Barkley L. Hendricks, Kerry James Marshall, Hank Willis Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the addition of Thomas extends a long pattern of pairing major artists with expansive exhibition spaces. For Thomas, it marks another chapter in a career that has moved steadily from critical recognition to institutional permanence.
