Broad Adds Mickalene Thomas' "Charnel House"
 |
| Mickalene Thomas, The Charnel House (Resist #5), 2021. The Broad |
The Broad has acquired its fourth work by Mickalene Thomas. The Charnel House (Resist #5) is an 11+ ft wide collage painting referencing Picasso's unfinished 1944–45 work, now at MoMA. Picasso was reacting to news photos of bodies in German death camps, hence the black-and-white palette. Thomas' picture collages photos and signs pertaining to the Black Panthers and a history of unjustified police slayings of Black men.
The Charnel House is the fifth of a series of Resist paintings inaugurated in 2017. They were considered a departure for Thomas, being explicitly political and incorporating vintage photographs. The Charnel House was lent to the Broad's 2024 Mickalene Thomas show and will appear in a new exhibition this fall, "Has the myth been shattered" (opening Nov. 21, 2026).
 |
| Mickalene Thomas, Resist, 2017 |
Comments
> to news photos of bodies
> in German death camps...
Nazi death camps were way more extreme and fanatical than anything since then, at least in North America.
As for a city's art scene, Paris came into its own during the 1800s, early 1900s. NYC's increasingly after that.
I wonder how a Mickalene, etc, in the Broad's collection will age compared with a Picasso, etc, in MOMA's?
I've heard people say that today's artistic-cultural scene compared with the past seems listless. Older TV shows on Netflix, etc, attract more viewers than brand-new programs do. LA's movie industry is plummeting because of current trends.
The brave new world of online, high tech and AI isn't your grandfather's world.
The Broad, MOCA or LACMA/Geffen maturing during the era of Taylor Swift versus their counterparts seeing a growth spurt during the era of a Whitney Houston, the Beatles or Frank Sinatra, etc, may lose something in translation.
Then again, it took decades for LA to even build a free-standing public art museum. So maybe a no-big-whoop acquisition of an artwork or the ongoing unsophisticated management of a museum in 2026 has been shadowing LA for decades.