The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.  November 22, 2025 – April 6, 2026. Photo courtesy of JSFF  

BY CLARE GEMIMA December 15, 2025

The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

November 22, 2025 – April 6, 2026.

Palm Springs Art Museum

Palm Springs, CA

Intoxication with the female form, particularly when rendered nude, has driven centuries of critical, moral, and romantic projection. The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas, currently on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum, confronts this enduring fixation head-on by placing two artists with radically different stakes in the subject, Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), and Mickalene Thomas (1971- ), into pointed dialogue. The exhibition hinges on an elegant structural device: two parallel vinyl timelines, beginning together and then splitting as they wrap the gallery’s perimeter. One, in red, charts paintings by women, from Berthe Morisot’s Devant la psyché, 1890, through Romare Bearden's Black Venus, 1968, while the other, in orange, tracks the corresponding history of paintings by men. Simple, yet effective, these color bands pulse through the exhibition like a heartbeat, and position the female form as an evolving, contested inheritance—an image whose meaning continues to shift as it moves through intertwining histories of vision, power, and desire.

Mickalene Thomas. Portrait of Marie Sitting in Black and White, 2012. Photogravure. Edition RP 3 / 4. 20 3/4 × 16 3/4 in. Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer. Photo courtesy of the author.

The red line carries directly into Mickalene Thomas’s rhinestoned portraits, catching the edges of her collaged surfaces and amplifying her dedication to reclaiming the Black female body from centuries of erasure and fetishisation. Thomas’s compositions glitter with agency, and stage both pleasure and resistance. “In my work, I deliberately foreground the Black body in the hope of giving it a new role,” she has said—“a central role in the history of body representation.” The sentiment reverberates throughout the room, particularly through powerful works like Portrait of Marie Sitting in Black and White, 2012, and August 1981, 2023, where photographic source material becomes a scaffold for new kinds of presence, strength, and permission.

In its institutional debut, Thomas’s l’espace entre les deux, 2025, stands as an immersive, two-room environment that synthesizes the artist’s longstanding interests in printmaking and collage. Furniture, books, plants, fixtures, and imagery are entirely rendered through processes of casting, digital collage, and paper-based construction. Encountered previously as two separate works at this year's IFPDA in New York, here they face one another, forming a charged axis that reads like two lovers—or two lives—that mirror, challenge, compliment, and complete each other. The inclusion of recreated books written by James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison reinforce Thomas’s insistence on grounding representation in Black intellectual lineages, and honor the powerful voices that, despite immense adversity, forged them. The installation sharpens the stakes of the exhibition, and highlights its central instability: the female body reads differently depending on who frames it—a Black woman or a white man, each shaped by unequal histories of power and representation.

Detail of the institutional debut of Thomas’s l’espace entre les deux (2025), a two-room environment that reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in printmaking, expressed here in every possible form—furniture, books, plants, pictures, light fixtures etc. collage, silkscreen, cast paper, digital collage. Photo courtesy of the author.

Across the gallery, the orange timeline slips behind Tom Wesselmann’s graphically rendered breasts, legs, and cropped torsos, underscoring a tradition of male artists who constructed the nude through desire, stylisation, and often, control. Wesselmann’s Seascape (Foot), 1968, and other bold screenprints like Judy with Black Hat, 1997, and Nude with Picasso, 2000, present a Eurocentric, eroticised vision of femininity, one that vacillates between admiration and objectification. His women are dislocated into fragments: breasts with red nipples, a parted mouth, the thigh of a woman named Claire (or a side lover named Monica). The works are undeniably seductive, and as vapid as they are driven by the familiar mechanics of the male gaze.

The exhibition includes works from Wesselmann’s Bedroom Paintings, 1968–1983, a series that reflects his shift from full figures to isolated fragments staged among everyday objects. Rendered in a more realistic style with consideration of light and shadow, a breast appears beside the edge of a pillow, a long tanned leg extends beyond its frame, and surfaces flatten into shapes reminiscent of advertising cut-outs. Over time, Wesselmann acknowledged a desire to move beyond eroticism toward something “emotionally touching, on levels other than sexual.” Whether that aspiration holds is debatable, yet his formal ambitions undeniably foreground the tensions The Female Form seeks to draw out. 

Divides between desire and agency extend into the adjoining gallery, where both red and orange timelines guide viewers towards a curated selection of paintings and sculptures from the Palm Springs Art Museum’s permanent collection. Yves Klein’s Vénus Bleue, conceived 1962, cast 1982, and John De Andrea’s uncannily real Joan, ca. 1994, meet the viewer like punctuation marks. Their presence broadens the context surrounding Thomas and Wesselmann's female forms, and reveal how persistently the nude has been mobilized by systems of fantasy, projection, and institutional authority.

Tom Wesselmann. Seascape (Foot), 1968. Screenprint. Edition 112/150. 18 1/8 × 18 in. Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer. Photo courtesy of JSFF

During the opening, Jordan Schnitzer, whose collection anchors the exhibition, articulated The Female Form's central question with characteristic bluntness: “From time immemorial, we’re facing the issue of objectifying women versus honoring them. You couldn’t pick two better artists to deal with that tension and help us think through our values.” It is this unresolved tension—rather than any historical march toward clarity—that the exhibition makes visible.

What emerges in this exhibition is not a neat comparison but a productive dissonance. Thomas asserts the figure as a site of reclamation, kinship, and queer sensuality, while Wesselmann exposes how the nude has been shaped—and misshaped—by male consumption. The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation do not resolve these tensions, but sharpen them, and ask viewers to retrace the histories and power structures that surface each and every time the image of a woman appears on a museum, gallery, or collector's wall.