Chiffon Thomas
Photo by Texas Isaiah @KingTexas.
I introduce material to elaborate meaning; a solid material or dense material signifies something that cannot be penetrated and is indestructible. I might use bibles, or religious doctrines that are very rigid, to create a body and let that be a visual language.
— Chiffon Thomas
Selected Works
Exhibitions
Selected Press
About the Artist
Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Chiffon Thomas received his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2020 and his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Thomas is the recent recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the Fountainhead Residency. Recent exhibitions include Antithesis, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023); Progeny, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Ribbon Sharp; Perrotin, Paris, FR (2024); and Personal Stories/ Political Realities, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, FR (2025). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others.
Chiffon Thomas’s practice is an interdisciplinary one, ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. Thomas’ powerful figurative assemblages examine the difficulties faced by defining one’s identity in contemporary society. Through contorted figures and fractured compositions that float seamlessly between historical and contemporary styles and references, Thomas portrays a form of self-expression that puts human touch at the forefront of his art. Reminiscent of the diverse, mixed media practices exhibited by Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold and David Hammons, Thomas’ own application of materiality becomes a language for translating cultural references and personal experiences. Raised with a strong religious upbringing, Thomas’ work often grapples with conflicting beliefs, values, and desires, primarily using tactile methods of hand embroidery, collaged found material and paint to perform as an expressive visual language that interprets personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong, and affirmations of self-identity. Scenes from family photographs are deconstructed into sketches and then built back up with colorful fibers, stitch by stitch. A sense of texture and dimensionality is achieved through the varying weights of thread, which are sometimes densely layered and other times sparse. Domestic scenes appear to shift in and out of focus, resulting in visceral collisions of abstraction and clarity that invite viewers to decode the fraught relations between memory and reality, visibility and understanding.
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