If we’re talking most memorable rooms in New York, Mickalene Thomas’ rhinestone vault takes the crown. Thousands of crystals in just about every color make up the towering shelves in the back corner of her studio, a converted two-storey mechanic’s garage. Just a few steps beyond, her latest collection is mounted in the main room. The sun hangs high over Brooklyn. What a fitting backdrop to welcome in her next chapter.

Hot off the Paris stop of her global All About Love tour, the Jersey-born, New York-based artist, it seems, is already looking ahead. By now, the works have touched down and gone up in Detroit for her ongoing show at The Shepherd, presented by the beloved Library Street Collective. But if you ask her, Beneath the Moonlight was a long time coming.

An international art star, Thomas is rewriting the rules of Black portraiture. Her opulent multimedia portraits of Black women in luxuriant interiors — maximalist collages of photography, screenprinting, painting, glitter, and rhinestones — have earned her acclaim within the contemporary art vanguard, and now she’s turning elsewhere. With the new show comes a new cast of subjects, with Thomas shifting her gaze towards Black masculinity for the very first time in an exhibition.

“Men do think they’re beautiful,” she shared. “We’ve given them the safe space, in a myriad of ways, to do that unapologetically. It’s okay to show your sensitive side. But that’s not always afforded to some Black men within their own communities.”

“Men do think they’re beautiful… It’s okay to show your sensitive side.”

Thomas isn’t leaving behind the ideas or lens long explored in her practice so much as deepening them. She’s still committed to vulnerability, sensuality, agency, and acceptance, simply reconstellating them through different figures. As with her femmes, she’s putting fire beneath historical images depicting Black masculinity, rewiring these canonical motifs into visions of possibility.

The show, curated by Dexter Wemberly, sees Thomas’ 2024 editorial commission for Another Man undergo her signature collage treatment. In the original photos, her subjects lay it all bare, dialing down stoicism in favor of something more open, more tender, christened by the same ardent attention she’s so well known for.

The finished canvases are rooted in strength as embodied rather than expected. Her figures don’t rehearse familiar narratives of resilience or burden, but exist on their own terms in states of grace. Even the show’s title, Beneath the Moon, evokes a sense of being – who we are when the rest of the world falls quiet.

“In some ways, softness is perceived as a weakness. But for me, I want to present softness as a strength,” she illuminates, gesturing toward “In Blue: The Odalisque.” The pearl earring. The languid Manet-like lay. The red scarf, “a reminder of warriorship,” still contends with societal norms.

“In some ways, softness is perceived as a weakness. But for me, I want to present softness as a strength.”

“When you take the Black body out of the context of how it’s stereotypically known, and put it up against historical ideologies, the narrative shifts.” Out with the Old Guard and in with the new. Fantasy, here, is reengineered into tools for unapologetic self-image. “It’s not just seen as some element of erotism, but as them owning their own prowess.”

The process behind each work is cinematic. In the best films, she explains, the storytelling is all in the editing, taking contradicting frames and making them into one. Richly patterned compositions pull from her library of references, as various eras, images, and styles happily collapse into sites of belonging, memory, and leisure. Even visual juxtapositions can be orchestrated into a symphony when done carefully.

Thomas stops in front of another piece, “In Blue: The Thinker,” on the opposite wall. The figure, channelling Rodin’s iconic sculpture, appears otherworldly, the back of his body cloaked in deep lapis paint. “He’s blossoming and contemplating the next move,” she muses. The work emerged from reflections on the bodies among the transatlantic. “What was that like for them to harbor this strength, harbor this tradition of protection of their people, and to be stripped of that?”

The story of transformation, told throughout the show, is also one of transcendence. Working with non-binary and trans models, too, gives acceptance that much more texture and depth, all of which radiate from the seven-foot-long canvas, “I’m Here,” the largest work in the show. Inspired by the luminous stained glass windows at the Shepherd, a Romanesque-style ex-church, three picks from the new “Au Revoir” series are featured alongside the portraits, echoing ongoing themes of rebirth and sacredness.

“The male body was not something I wanted to shy away from. It was more about when the right time is for me to do it, on my terms.”

It was church, after all, that inspired the rhinestones in the first place. Thomas often cites matriarchs as the inspiration behind her leading ladies, and watching her grandmother get dressed in her Sunday best to go on stage and lead the congregation choir initially instilled love and curiosity for how we perform. As a child, “seeing those rituals of how we adorn ourselves,” she reflects, “those moments were just so ceremonious.” If clothing is a way of staking a place in this world, so too, in the case of Beneath the Moonlight, is the lack thereof: authoring when, how, and by whom you’re desired.

Back in the studio, the question still hangs heavy: why now? “The male body was not something I wanted to shy away from,” she puts plainly. “It was more about when the right time is for me to do it, on my terms.”

For two decades, Thomas waited for the work to find her. There’s always noise about the next new thing, and the market’s appetite for “question-answer” progress, but she held off for the opening she needed, to see it through her own lens. “It needs to come out of the experience, from being in the moment. And you don’t always know when you’re in it. My work always has to make sense to the process. It has to come out of becoming.” And if this marks a new chapter, it’s one without a final page. The rest, as Thomas sees it, is already somewhere in the making.

Beneath the Moonlight is now on view at The Shepherd until August 23.

Studio portraits by Lila Barth. All images courtesy of the Artist and Library Street Collective.