Mickalene Thomas Accused of Copyright Infringement in New Lawsuit

Mickalene Thomas, an artist identified for her standard work and photo-based installations centering Black ladies, is dealing with a lawsuit from the photographer Barbara Karant, who alleges that Thomas used her footage with out attribution or permission in works that appeared at an array of museums and blue-chip galleries.

“In installation after installation, and in collage after collage, Thomas has engaged in the wholesale copying of copyrighted works from a fellow artist,” the lawsuit claims.

Filed final month in Illinois’s North District Court, Karant’s lawsuit revolves across the photographer’s photographs of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, which owned the publications Ebony and Jet till 2016. Once thought of the biggest Black-run publishing agency within the US, the corporate went out of enterprise in 2019, although its publications stay a degree of reference for a lot of artists, including Theaster Gates, who owns many historic images and objects from the corporate’s holdings. (A consortium of foundations acquired the publications’ photograph archives of greater than 4 million prints and negatives in 2019, with plans to donate them to the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.)

Starting in 2013, one 12 months after the Johnson Publishing Company vacated its longtime house, Karant started visiting the corporate’s headquarters to {photograph} its interiors. The ensuing collection, accomplished in 2015, is named “820 Ebony/Jet”; it includes 250 photographs, based on the swimsuit. Karant’s submitting notably mentions that she is making ready a e-book of those images that’s due out in September; the e-book consists of writings by students similar to Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis.

Karant’s images function empty hallways, workplaces, and lobbies, usually with an consideration to proof of their previous utilization. In a New York Times article from 2015, the late images curator Maurice Berger praised the works for implicitly contending with how the corporate’s magazines have been “committed to altering how African-Americans were represented.”

“In this context,” Berger wrote, “Ms. Karant’s photographs depict more than just the desolate remains of a once vital building: They make visible, in ways both compelling and poignant, an important aspect of the company’s self-image.”

Thomas declined to touch upon the lawsuit. A lawyer for Karant declined to remark additional.

Karant’s images have figured in a few of Thomas’s current exhibits, together with one staged at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in 2021 that featured pixelated variations of Karant’s footage. The launch for that exhibition famous that, for Thomas, “engaging in a cultural touchstone like Jet underscores her determined commitment to visibility, and historical and contemporary celebrations of Blackness, femininity, and queerness.” The launch didn’t identify Karant.

“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” a survey of the artist’s work that first appeared on the Broad museum in Los Angeles in 2024, featured much more direct variations of Karant’s images. The survey went on to journey to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Hayward Gallery in London, and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.

In that survey, Karant’s images of a sublime Johnson Publishing Company ground, for instance, acted because the backdrop for Thomas’s collaged work.

The lawsuit didn’t make it clear to what extent, if in any respect, Thomas’s backdrops represent discrete artworks. Based on documentation of the exhibition, it seems that Thomas edited Karant’s images, that are fragmented and cropped in some instances. Karant claims that this “copying was unauthorized and without attribution.”

Though Thomas’s survey opened in 2024, Karant says that she didn’t turn into conscious of the installations containing variations of her photographs till 2025.

Karant’s lawsuit additionally attracts consideration to sure work by Thomas that make the most of parts from the “820 Ebony/Jet” footage. Nus Exotiques #10 (2025), a portray by Thomas that’s reproduced in Karant’s lawsuit, visibly includes a window from one in every of Karant’s images that Thomas turned on its aspect. In the Thomas portray, the window is located subsequent to a nude Black lady.

All of those situations present that Thomas “used Karant’s photography to enhance her reputation and sell her work,” based on Karant’s lawsuit. In complete, the lawsuit claims that Thomas appropriated “more than a dozen” of Karant’s images from the “820 Ebony/Jet” collection.

Alongside Thomas, the lawsuit names 4 galleries—Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Yancey Richardson, Kavi Gupta, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia—as defendants as a result of they exhibited works by the artist that function Karant’s photographs.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan mentioned in an announcement that it’s “deeply respectful of all artists’ rights and creativity and has deep admiration for artists’ creative processes” and declined to remark additional as a result of the case was nonetheless pending. Yancey Richardson and Galerie Nathalie Obadia declined to remark. Kavi Gupta didn’t reply to request for remark.

Thomas, who lately made the “Time 100” listing, can be at the moment dealing with a lawsuit from her former romantic companion Racquel Chevremont, who alleged the artist mismanaged cash, harassed her, and created an “abusive workplace environment” final 12 months. A spokesperson for the artist denied these allegations, describing them as “a desperate attempt to remain relevant and profit off Mickalene’s hard-earned reputation, career achievements, and legacy.”