Mickalene Thomas’s complex portraits foreground femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender. Although she is best known for her bejeweled paintings of Black women in powerful and provocative poses, Thomas is drawn to the immediacy and realism of photography. Her photographs include details—such as the faint impression left by a sock on the woman’s ankle in Remember Me—that reveal the constructed nature of the image and point to the fact that her subjects are not airbrushed models but real women. Thomas often creates sets for her works, evoking the decor and fashions from the 1960s to 1980s as well as the social, political, and cultural currents of the period, including the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the Black Is Beautiful movement.