Mickalene Thomas, an artist known for her popular paintings and photo-based installations centering Black women, is facing a lawsuit from the photographer Barbara Karant, who alleges that Thomas used her pictures without attribution or permission in works that appeared at an array of museums and blue-chip galleries.
“In installation after installation, and in collage after collage, Thomas has engaged in the wholesale copying of copyrighted works from a fellow artist,” the lawsuit claims.
Filed last month in Illinois’s North District Court, Karant’s lawsuit revolves around the photographer’s images of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, which owned the publications Ebony and Jet until 2016. Once considered the largest Black-run publishing firm in the US, the company went out of business in 2019, though its publications remain a point of reference for many artists, including Theaster Gates, who owns many historic photographs and objects from the company’s holdings. (A consortium of foundations acquired the publications’ photo archives of more than 4 million prints and negatives in 2019, with plans to donate them to the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.)
Starting in 2013, one year after the Johnson Publishing Company vacated its longtime home, Karant began visiting the company’s headquarters to photograph its interiors. The resulting series, completed in 2015, is known as “820 Ebony/Jet”; it comprises 250 images, according to the suit. Karant’s filing notably mentions that she is preparing a book of these photographs that is due out in September; the book includes writings by scholars such as Cheryl Finley and Deborah Willis.
Karant’s photographs feature empty hallways, offices, and lobbies, often with an attention to evidences of their past usage. In a New York Times article from 2015, the late photography curator Maurice Berger praised the works for implicitly contending with how the company’s magazines were “committed to altering how African-Americans were represented.”
“In this context,” Berger wrote, “Ms. Karant’s photographs depict more than just the desolate remains of a once vital building: They make visible, in ways both compelling and poignant, an important aspect of the company’s self-image.”
Thomas declined to comment on the lawsuit. A lawyer for Karant declined to comment further.
Karant’s photographs have figured in some of Thomas’s recent shows, including one staged at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in 2021 that featured pixelated versions of Karant’s pictures. The release for that exhibition noted that, for Thomas, “engaging in a cultural touchstone like Jet underscores her determined commitment to visibility, and historical and contemporary celebrations of Blackness, femininity, and queerness.” The release did not name Karant.
“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love,” a survey of the artist’s work that first appeared at the Broad museum in Los Angeles in 2024, featured even more direct versions of Karant’s photographs. The survey went on to travel to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Hayward Gallery in London, and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.
When Mickalene Thomas’s survey visited the Hayward Gallery in 2025, it contained a backdrop that included Barbara Karant’s photographs.
Photo Devika Bilimoria/Getty Images
In that survey, Karant’s photographs of an elegant Johnson Publishing Company floor, for example, acted as the backdrop for Thomas’s collaged paintings.
The lawsuit did not make it clear to what extent, if at all, Thomas’s backdrops constitute discrete artworks. Based on documentation of the exhibition, it appears that Thomas edited Karant’s photographs, which are fragmented and cropped in some cases. Karant claims that this “copying was unauthorized and without attribution.”
Though Thomas’s survey opened in 2024, Karant says that she did not become aware of the installations containing versions of her images until 2025.
Karant’s lawsuit also draws attention to certain paintings by Thomas that utilize elements from the “820 Ebony/Jet” pictures. Nus Exotiques #10 (2025), a painting by Thomas that is reproduced in Karant’s lawsuit, visibly features a window from one of Karant’s photographs that Thomas turned on its side. In the Thomas painting, the window is situated next to a nude Black woman.
All of these instances show that Thomas “used Karant’s photography to enhance her reputation and sell her work,” according to Karant’s lawsuit. In total, the lawsuit claims that Thomas appropriated “more than a dozen” of Karant’s photographs from the “820 Ebony/Jet” series.
Alongside Thomas, the lawsuit names four galleries—Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Yancey Richardson, Kavi Gupta, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia—as defendants because they exhibited works by the artist that feature Karant’s images.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan said in a statement that it is “deeply respectful of all artists’ rights and creativity and has deep admiration for artists’ creative processes” and declined to comment further because the case was still pending. Yancey Richardson and Galerie Nathalie Obadia declined to comment. Kavi Gupta did not respond to request for comment.
Thomas, who recently made the “Time 100” list, is also currently facing a lawsuit from her former romantic partner Racquel Chevremont, who alleged the artist mismanaged money, harassed her, and created an “abusive workplace environment” last year. A spokesperson for the artist denied these allegations, describing them as “a desperate attempt to remain relevant and profit off Mickalene’s hard-earned reputation, career achievements, and legacy.”
