Two Palms is pleased to premier the continuation of Mickalene Thomas’s l’espace entre les deux at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. The project marks an extraordinary evolution in her practice—an expansion that unites collage, printmaking, and sculpture into a single, radiant language of surface, structure, and social reflection. In the Two Palms studio, Thomas has embraced the print workshop as both laboratory and stage: a site where etching, silkscreen, relief, and cast paper intersect, and where the tactile and the conceptual are inseparable. The results are works that shimmer with material intensity and historical consciousness, transforming the visual seductions of representation into acts of presence, reclamation, and critique.

The new collages emerge from a dense layering of processes—etching and silkscreen joined with embossing, metallic leaf, velvet, wire mesh, wood veneer, and transfer print—each element contributing to the works’ sensuous complexity. A 1960s Jet Magazine model, once circulated through the mechanical codes of commercial printing, reappears as an embossed image on copper or aluminum, her beauty no longer mass-produced but reimagined as sculptural form. Relief prints sink into velvet; metallic leaf glints across planes of pattern and texture; fragments of image, material, and memory assemble into compositions that seem to breathe. Thomas’s collages are lush, generous objects, but beneath their beauty lies an insistence on the politics of making—on how visibility, desirability, and representation are constructed and remade through the very materials of art. Like Romare Bearden before her, she treats fragmentation not as rupture but as resource: cutting and reassembling as an ethics of survival, a means to build anew from what has been divided. Her collages collapse the distinction between high and vernacular, art and life, glamour and critique; they do not depict desire so much as perform it, with the surface itself as stage, that is necessary. 

If the collages extend the image outward into material life, the cast paper sculptures bring language itself into form. Thomas’s totemic stacks of cast paper books—modeled after the works of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and other prominent Black writers—operate simultaneously as monument, metaphor, and critique. Cast from colored paper pulp, these sculptures transpose weight into lightness, turning texts once considered too heavy for public discourse into feather-light presences that nonetheless refuse disappearance. Their paradox is deliberate: what the culture seeks to suppress, Thomas renders indelible. These sculptures are monuments that breathe, that reflect the vulnerability of pulp and pigment. They honor not the fixity of history but its persistence, the way ideas circulate, hand to hand, even when institutions attempt to silence them. In this inversion, lightness becomes tensile strength—a metaphor for endurance under pressure, for the uncontainable life of words.

The resonance between the collages and the sculptures is profound. Both are built through acts of assembly—cutting, pressing, layering—acts that transform fragmentation into form. Both turn sensuality into a kind of knowledge, the pleasure of texture inseparable from the rigor of critique. And both insist that beauty is not a retreat from history but one of its most powerful vessels. In an era when books by Black writers are being banned, Thomas’s cast paper sculptures restore them to visibility, making censorship’s erasures impossible to ignore. These are counter-archives of resilience, radiant with color and conviction, proposing that fragility and strength are not opposites but allies—that presence itself, like paper, is something pressed into being.

These works will be debuted in the Two Palms booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, Dec 3 - 7, 2025.