Screening: Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman

In the spirit of Mother’s Day, we present Mickalene Thomas’s directorial debut, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman (2012, 24 min.). In this short documentary, Thomas celebrates her mother and longtime muse Sandra Bush. Often depicted in her paintings as rhinestone-clad and willowy, the film reveals another side of this beautiful woman through stories of her personal and physical struggles, including kidney disease. As Thomas explains, “One of the reasons I used my mother is because of her charisma, her beauty . . . and I thought about how I wasn’t [using her] because she was sick, and how a different type of beauty, a different type of aging, a different type of portraiture could come across on film.”

Join us for an introduction and a post-screening Q&A with Mickalene Thomas.