“We were having communication issues and this was a way for us to come together,” says Mickalene Thomas, whose film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman that depicts her flamboyant late mother Sandra Bush is currently screening at the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. “It allowed me to look at her not only as a subject—as my muse—but as a person. I really tried to understand her world, her own sexuality and femininity and beauty.”  

The MoMA- and Whitney-exhibiting artist had used her mother as a muse since her time on her Fine Art Masters at Yale, a process that acted as a kind of therapy, a refuge from her parents’ drug addiction and her experience of coming out. “We developed this beautiful relationship through art, and it’s helped me understand my own trajectory in the world,” she adds. 

Thomas long struggled to come to terms with Bush as her maternal influence: this figure of fierce independence, a victim of both drug and domestic abuse, and magnificent beauty. Towards her later years, she filmed her mother as her skin wrinkled and hair thinned out. Though she refused to look at herself in the mirror, Bush carried on wearing a sleek wig and bright lipstick.  

Now, two years after her passing, Thomas obsessively explores the items her mother left behind, casting her clothes and accessories in bronze, immortalizing her seductive presence and joie de vivre in the process. “Beauty is extraordinary and it’s complex. It’s negative and positive,” says Thomas. “It’s indescribable, mysterious, and at its best when it comes from within.” 

Shirine Saad is an editor and writer based in Brooklyn.

I Was Born To Do Great Things runs at The Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago until this Saturday November 15.