This past week, Document Editor-in-Chief Nick Vogelson joined Mickalene Thomas and an intimate circle of friends and collaborators—including Derrick Adams, Marilyn Minter, George Wells, Latham Thomas, Yancey Richardson, Michael Chuapoco, Joshua Woods, Sharon Horowitz, Stephanie Horton, Nona Hendryx, Dynasty Ogun, Soull Ogun, Glori Cohen, McKenzie Liautaud, Bevy Smith, and more—for a dinner in honor of Thomas’s upcoming exhibition All About Love at the Grand Palais in Paris. The gathering took place at Papa San in New York, where guests were welcomed with a menu of signature cocktails and dishes shaped by the restaurant’s Japanese izakaya sensibility.

Opening December 17, 2025, All About Love is a landmark retrospective tracing more than two decades of Thomas’s work. The exhibition centers the visibility, agency, and radical joy of Black women, celebrating love as a generative force—of liberation, self-definition, and community. Through richly textured compositions and her iconic rhinestone-studded surfaces, Thomas depicts her subjects—friends, family, lovers, and cultural figures—with a confidence and sensuality that reclaims spaces where Black women have been historically overlooked or misrepresented. With this exhibition, she becomes the first African-American artist to receive a major solo presentation at the Grand Palais.

A multidisciplinary force, Thomas draws from art history, the vernacular archive, and the riotous language of popular culture. Her world-making—across painting, photography, collage, video, and installation—reimagines the canon through a lens that centers Black women as authors, subjects, and protagonists of their own narratives. Her portraits do more than depict; they invite. They usher viewers into spaces where intimacy is a framework and joy is resistance.

The evening was made possible with generous support from George Wells and Yancey Richardson.