The IFPDA Print Fair continues its practice of engaging artists actively involved in printmaking to create site-specific installations for the fair. In the past, the fair has commissioned installations by Derrick Adams, LaToya Hobbs, Yashua Klos, and Swoon. For the 2025 Print Fair, Mickalene Thomas presents l’espace entre les deux (2025), two rooms that reflect the artist’s longtime interests in interiors and the art of printmaking, pushing the conceptual boundaries of both practices. The project was commissioned by the IFPDA, produced by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, and organized by Sharon Coplan with production assistance from Two Palms and Studio Mickalene.

​​

​

l’espace entre les deux; Between Life and Art

by Angela Flournoy

 

In "l’espace entre les deux” (2025), Mickalene Thomas creates two rooms that reflect the artist’s longtime interest in interiors and the art of printmaking, pushing the conceptual boundaries of both practices. The project was commissioned by the IFPDA and organized by Sharon Coplan, with production assistance from Two Palms and major support from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

 

Over a decade ago, Thomas, a painter, photographer, collage artist and designer, began creating interiors—both paintings and collage—as an outcropping of the interior design work she undertook for her iconic photography sittings. Drawing inspiration from the 1970s living rooms of her childhood, as well as from encyclopedias of interiors and catalogs from the time period, the spaces Thomas creates nod to nostalgia while investigating the ways that home spaces continue to be sites of technological innovation. Linoleum flooring, fabricated paneling, upholstery and wallpapering straddle the line between modern efficiency and traditional beautification. 

​

In "l’espace entre les deux," Thomas, with production assistance from Two Palms, has created paper-pulp sculpture, collages, silkscreens, and three-dimensional cast paper works that evoke the feeling of entering one of Thomas’s iconic living rooms. Plants, lamps, carpeting, books and furniture made of paper in many forms inhabit all planes of the space, but the artwork goes beyond mere trompe l'oeil illusions to suggest a third approach, a space between strict duplication of real life and static acknowledgement of the artifice at play. 

​

“In art, we are often looking and drawing inspiration to what is already being accomplished in nature,” Thomas said. “Trees, the origin of paper, exist three-dimensional— so why can’t the creations we make out of paper mimic or replicate that same depth and dimensionality?” 

​

While Thomas is famous for her renderings of the Black female form, her interiors are often unpeopled. Nevertheless, the sense of powerful, sensual ease that permeates her portraiture is present within these rooms, with the choice of décor and arrangement of objects suggesting not a single narrative but many layers of narrative possibility. We may not know the inhabitants of the space, but something of their sensibility is transmitted all the same. 

​

“I am constantly contemplating ways to juxtapose different kinds of materiality,” Thomas said. I am fascinated by the possibilities of printmaking, how can I push beyond its traditional boundaries and explore new creative parameters.”

In ”l’espace entre les deux," Thomas’s playful, investigatory approach to material results in something akin to a living collage, which creates a new conversation with the selection of framed collages displayed within the space. She turns what others might see as a constraint—working primarily in paper—into a world of opportunity. 

 

About the writer: Angela Flournoy is an American writer. Her debut novel The Turner House won the First Novelist Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2015.