In Mickalene Thomas’ art work, Black women are front and center. Her subjects are often at leisure, resting on couches and chairs, sometimes nude, and frequently accentuated by rhinestones and rich colorful patterns.

“I would describe my art as radically shifting notions of beauty by claiming space,” she says. “We’ve been supportive characters for far too long and … my art gives Black women their flowers and lets them know that they are the leading role.”

The scale of Thomas’ paintings, often made of unconventional materials like glitter, sequins, and yarn, makes them feel larger than life, with the eyes of her subjects gazing directly at the viewer. Each piece begins as a collage.

“I love the instant, tangible way having my hands at it, as if I’m sculpting with the paper, allows me the immediacy of the process,” she says. “My scissors are sort of a way of drawing.”

Thomas often recasts scenes from 19th-century French paintings, centering Black sensuality and power. She says her ultimate goal is to celebrate the “sisterhood” that exists between Black women, and which she grew up experiencing.

Mickalene Thomas describes her work as “radically shifting notions of beauty by claiming space.”

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“The trials and tribulations of my own life as a child did not negate the fact that there was a lot to love and care and family and support and comfort, even when there was struggle,” she says. “So that’s what I bring forth in my work.”

Thomas’ latest exhibition, “All About Love,” is midway through an international tour with stops in Los Angeles, Philadelphia (The Barnes Foundation, through Jan. 12, 2025), London and France. The Barnes exhibition features 50 paintings, collages, and photography spanning over two decades, inspired by the women in her life, including her mother, who died in 2012.

Interview highlights

Thomas’ 2010 “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires” reinterprets Manet’s 1863 painting. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel.

Mickalene Thomas /Jean Pierre and Rachel Lehman Collection/The Barnes Foundation

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On her 2010 reinterpretation of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe”

I decided to reinterpret or reclaim this space [by depicting] … three powerful women who are fully clothed, seated and not at a picnic, just lounging and giving each other their flowers.

On finding a home in art 

I think that art has saved my life, for sure. Growing up, going to after school programs at the Newark Museum, it was, for me, this safe haven, this comfort, this refuge. I loved going there after school. I loved doing all the craft projects, the papier-mâché, exploring different ways of making self-portraits or building houses with popsicle sticks and all those things. … It was just an outlet, a way of expressing myself, but also a place to go after school until my mother got off work.

On using inexpensive craft supplies 

When I was in Pratt, I couldn’t afford oil paint. I would rummage, often through the recycled stretcher bins, and gather my materials from that. And all I could afford was craft materials because they were cheaper than oil paint, like felt and different fabrics, glitter. … So I gravitated towards those materials because they were accessible and affordable for me. But what they did was open up a way of expressing myself. … There was a struggle of completing some assignments because some you had to use oil paint or some you had to use the traditional materials. … Sometimes people [would] throw away tubes of paint because they think it’s [finished] and [I’d] just cut it open, [and] there’s still paint in there.

[Now] I love using the high-end material and still the acrylic. I use both. But now I mix them up. And so you can’t tell what’s high or low, but that’s just part of life sometimes, right? You can wear H&M with a Prada jacket and still look fabulous. … Sometimes things that are so simplistic and that cost nothing are so much more rewarding.

On her late mother’s support of her work 

She got to see it, experience it, celebrate it. She was celebrated for it. She was admired and adored. She loved the fact that she was a part of my art. She loved coming to the openings. She loved coming to my friends’ openings. She loved supporting my community. So whether it was my opening or one of my artist friends’, she would show up. And so I love that about her. She was a great advocate. She’s always been an advocate for the arts. She always supported that. When I decided I wanted to be an artist, she never looked at it as, “Why you want to go and do that?” Some of those things were in my head, but she never vocalized that. She was supportive.

Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

TONOPAH, Nev. —  Business is so good at the Clown Motel, you might expect more of its painted faces to be smiling.

But as Vijay Mehar has learned in his years as owner of the creepiest motel in Tonopah, Nev., happy clowns are not what most of his customers want.

What they seem to want is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. Basically, Mehar said recently, “they want to be scared.”

So aiming to lure more people off Main Street (a.k.a. U.S. 95) to visit this 31-room motel in the dusty, stark middle of Nevada, Mehar is boosting his creepiness quotient.

By the end of 2025, he’s hoping to have completed a 900-square-foot addition, doubling the size of the motel’s busy, disquieting lobby-museum-gift shop area. Meanwhile, behind the motel, Mehar is planning a year-round haunted house, to be made of 11 shipping containers.

Many details are yet to be settled, but the idea is for these additions to complement the motel’s existing guest rooms, which teem with enough clown imagery to eclipse a Ringling Brothers reunion. Mehar also aims to convert an existing room into a honeymoon suite.

“America’s Scariest Motel,” read the brochures by the register. “Let fear run down your spine.”

There are paintings, dolls and ceramic figures, each with its own expression — smiling, laughing, smirking, weeping or silently shrieking. And then there are the neighbors. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents.

The creepy clown film “It” is muralized on the walls outside the rooms.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Some guests explore the cemetery after dark or google “fear of clowns” (coulrophobia). Others settle in with a horror movie, perhaps one of the three made on site in the last six years. (“I am the bad clown in ‘Clown Motel 2,’ ” Mehar confided.)

Mehar said hundreds of people stop by the motel on busy days, mostly focusing on the gift shop and the crowded, dusty shelves of the museum. The clowns there, contributed by donors worldwide, are not for sale.

“When we came here, there were 800 or 850 clowns,” Mehar said. “Right now, we have close to 6,000.”

The lobby-gift shop-museum expansion means more room to show them off, along with the motel’s wall-mounted array of presidential caricatures, Joe Biden and Donald Trump included, each sporting a clown’s red nose.

Clown miniatures, donated to the Clown Motel from around the world, are on display around the motel.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

In the six years Mehar has owned the place, the gift shop merch inventory has swollen from hats, T-shirts and sweatshirts to include nearly 100 products: art, ash trays, bracelets, bumper stickers, clothing, key chains, magnets, mugs, patches, shot glasses and wallets.

“Do you use knives? I have clown knives,” Behar said, raising one in his right hand. The blades are 4 inches long.

Throughout the motel’s corridors and no-frills guest rooms (usually $85 to $150; rated at 3.5 stars by Yelp and Trip Advisor), the clowns continue against a color scheme of purple, yellow and red, augmented by polka dots of blue and green.

A spot check revealed five clowns in Room 102 and a dozen in Room 208 (but none in the bathrooms). Several rooms are themed, including 222, which highlights Clownvis (Elvis as a clown, basically).

If you book that room, the motel warns, you may be awakened by a mysterious “malevolent entity.” The hotel also warns all guests that, despite monthly pest-control visits, you may encounter “UFI’s (Unwanted Flying Insects),” because rooms open to the outdoors. (This part of Nevada is known for its many Mormon crickets.)

Every room at the Clown Motel, has its own art display.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

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“If we had paid 60, or 70, or even 80 bucks, this place might have been worth it,” wrote one unamused motel customer on Trip Advisor recently.

“We had good fun, and even better we weren’t murdered,” wrote another.

It’s a family project. After years as an art director, Mehar’s brother, Hame Anand, serves as manager of the motel and has masterminded its latest face-lift, which includes a pair of clown cut-outs, two stories tall, that beckon passing traffic.

Many travelers make the 210-mile drive north from Las Vegas just for the clown experience. At booking or check-in, guests often sign on for a motel and cemetery tour with guide Wanda Crisp.

Tonopah sits roughly midway between Las Vegas and Reno, with a population (about 2,100) that’s been shrinking for more than 30 years. The hillside town, born as a silver-mining outpost in the first years of the 20th century, features a pair of historic hotels, the Mizpah (built in 1907, renovated 2011) and the Belvada (built as a bank in 1906, renovated in 2020), which flank Main Street in the heart of town. Tonopah Historic Mining Park includes an underground tunnel and displays of old equipment and minerals.

The Clown Motel is owned by Vijay Mehar and his family.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

You could say the Clown Motel grew out of the cemetery. As local boosters tell the story, a miner and clown-collector named Clarence David was killed in 1911 in a mining accident and buried in the cemetery. Thus, when two of his children, Leona and Leroy, decided to open a motel (then known as the David Motel) next to the cemetery in 1985, they displayed about 150 of their late father’s clown images and figures.

A decade later, they sold it to longtime Tonopah entrepreneur Bob Perchetti, who transformed the motel as part of his efforts to boost local tourism.

The big breakthrough came in 2015, when a crew from the television series “Ghost Adventures” came to shoot at the Clown Motel, intriguing lovers of kitsch and horror nationwide.

By then, Perchetti (who died this year) was well into his 70s. A few years later, he put the 1.2-acre motel property up for sale, asking $900,000 and later $600,000 (clown collection included). In 2019, veteran Las Vegas motel proprietor Mehar and his family bought it.

The façade of the Clown Motel.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

Mehar, who now splits his time between Tonopah and Vegas, declined to say the sale price, but said he was able to pay off the loan within a few years. Two or three times a year, “the paranormal people” will book the whole place, Mehar said, “and there’s a YouTuber every second day.”

That doesn’t mean the motel is a gold mine — Mehar still does most repairs and improvements himself — but in its niche, it has no rival.

“You know the American dream, rich and famous?” Mehar asked. “We’re half the way.”

How do you make a documentary when you can’t film in person — and even hiring a cameraperson is risky?

That was the challenge for the award-winning Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani, who left the country after the Taliban takeover. Her new documentary, Bread & Roses, takes the viewers into the heart of the women’s resistance in Afghanistan.

Using a mosaic of cell phone footage stitched together with video from Mani’s archives, the film tells the story of the women who are protesting the Taliban’s erasure of women from political and public life. It follows the lives of three activists as they navigate a changing country where they are rapidly losing hard-earned rights and freedoms. 

With a mosaic of cellphone footage, videos from Mani’s archives and clips from camerapersons hired to follow the protestors, the film tells the story of the women who are protesting the Taliban’s erasure of women from political and public life. It follows the lives of three activists as they navigate a changing country where they are rapidly losing hard-earned rights and freedoms.

The title, Bread & Roses, is inspired by the protestors’ slogan — Naan, Kar, Azaadi (Bread, Work, Freedom) — and also echoes a phrase used by the early women’s suffrage movement in the United States. The film began streaming on Apple TV+ in November.

Since the Taliban came to power in August 2021, they have imposed a series of restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms, including bans on higher education, employment in various sectors and public and political participation. Women are also banned from visiting public baths or parks or traveling long distances without a male guardian.

Despite the restrictions, women in Afghanistan have continued to protest the Taliban and are part of the only civil resistance left in the country. The consequences of such opposition can be dangerous; many women activists have been detained in Taliban prisons where they have reportedly faced torture, abuse and even rape.

Sahra Mani is an Afghan filmmaker best known for her documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me, about women survivors of sexual abuse in Afghanistan, released in 2018 and received the Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award the next year. Mani lived and worked in Kabul prior to the Taliban takeover in 2021 and was a lecturer at Kabul University.

The team behind Bread & Roses: From left, executive producer Malala Yousafzai, producers Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarocchi, and director/producer Sahra Mani at the November premiere of the documentary film about Afghan women.

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP/Invision

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Three years on, the Taliban’s atrocities against Afghan women seem to have slipped out of international headlines. Mani hopes to highlight these activists and their resistance in her movie, she tells NPR. (The three main subjects have all since left the country.)

“It would be a serious mistake to forget the Afghan women or ignore the Taliban’s atrocities,” she says. “Remember that September 11 attacks were planned in this region, involved this very group. So to join the Afghan women’s resistance is part of everyone’s responsibility for the sake of our collective futures.

Mani spoke to NPR about the film. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When was the idea for this movie born?

When I lived in Afghanistan [from birth until the Taliban takeover] , women were visible everywhere — you saw them in the media, on international platforms, in politics, in the parliament representing our people. They worked closely with [the President].

When Kabul fell [to the Taliban in August 2021], I saw women taking charge of the protests, chanting for education, rights to work, resisting the Taliban’s dictatorship. I was very amazed with the bravery of these women. I asked myself where had they been all these years. These were the common women of Afghanistan — young, educated girls and women representing the country. I was so happy to see them and quickly reached out to talk to them.

[During the Taliban takeover] I was working with a charity helping Afghan women at risk. Many of the women were sole breadwinners of their families and had lost their jobs and their rights because of the Taliban. So through the charity, I got to know many women, wonderful brave women, and sometimes they would send me [phone camera] videos of their daily life, their challenges and even their fights with the Taliban.

In one video, a group of women shout their slogan “Bread, work, freedom” as they face off with an armed Taliban fighter as he points his weapon at them. In another video, a group of masked women filmed themselves spraying anti-Taliban graffiti on the streets in Kabul in the middle of the night.

I started archiving these videos. Initially, I wasn’t planning on making a film. The idea was simply to preserve evidence of women’s movement in Afghanistan. But then I was approached by Jennifer Lawrence’s team and we decided that the world needs to see these videos and the strength of the women of Afghanistan.

Was it difficult to get women to participate in the documentary?

On the contrary, they were already filming themselves and had been sharing their experiences with me. They want the world to see what it is like to live under a dictatorship that prevents you from doing basic things, like going to school, working or even taking a taxi.

Later when we started working on the documentary, we found camerapersons inside Kabul and trained them how to safely film [the women protestors].

How did you put the movie together?

Nowadays, documentary filmmaking allows for a lot of opportunities and different ways to tell your story. We used cell phone videos, images with voiceovers as well as materials from my archives from during my time as a filmmaker in Kabul.

The cellphone videos are not always of very good quality, but we found them to be indispensable to the storytelling. [They] provide authenticity. We complemented them with the archival videos.

During the last Taliban rule in the 1990s, every so often a video of the Taliban’s mistreatment of women — including public executions —  would get leaked, shocking the world. Now there is a lot more coverage of the situation inside Afghanistan. How does your movie add to our knowledge of the situation.

This movie is documentary evidence of what is happening, the historical changes, inside Afghanistan.

It was only when Jennifer Lawrence and Malala Yousafzai showed willingness to support me as a filmmaker that it made me realize that it could be a more ambitious project. It became more and more urgent to me to help raise voices of the women of Afghanistan, bring them to the larger global platform.

What do you hope will be the impact of this film?

When people watch this film, I want them to be able to feel the experiences of the Afghan women, not only the anger and challenges but also their joys when they help each other or their celebration of the achievement.

As a filmmaker I have tried to use the tool of cinema to bring these stories forward with the hopes that people can connect with the emotions and experiences of these women and express solidarity. I hope the viewer can see and feel the experiences of living under the dictatorship of Taliban, enough for them to want to do something about, take action, reach out to their local governments and pressure them to recognize gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

I want people to join Afghan women in pressuring the United Nations to hold the Taliban accountable for the crime they have done on Afghan women and Afghan people.

Dr. Zahra Mohammadi, a dentist in Afghanistan, is profiled in the new documentary Bread & Roses. She has since left the country.

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What’s the biggest single loss for women?

Afghan women lost so much in the Taliban’s takeover. From the identities they built as professionals, educators, politicians et cetera to their very basic rights as humans, to learn, to sing, to talk to other women, to even exist in many spaces. They are continually losing their rights.

As you probably know there are close to 100 edicts that the Taliban have imposed on just women’s rights. This is not normal. This is terrorism, and it should be accepted by anyone as a normal way of life.

Will the movie be screened, discreetly of course, inside Afghanistan?

There is a possibility. It’s the choice of my distributor, but at the moment Apple TV+ has provided it in 100 countries. So that’s an important step. I also have several [online] workshops and training with Afghan students, Afghan girls and I will talk to them about the film. I would certainly want them to see it, too. Because I don’t look at this only as a movie. To me, this is an extension of the Afghan women’s movement.

Is there one scene that is particularly meaningful to you?

There are so many special and emotional moments, but I remember this one clip when the Taliban used tear gas on the women protestors in the streets. They started shouting and running. The camera follows the women as they try to get away, but [the camera] is upturned [when the camera operator was running] and you see the trees of Kabul. For a moment, all you see are the trees as you hear women shouting and crying.

For me, that represented that even the trees were crying in solidarity with the women. It was very emotional for me personally, as someone from Kabul, that even nature weeps with our women.

Ruchi Kumar is a journalist who reports on conflict, politics, development and culture in India and Afghanistan. She tweets at @RuchiKumarRuchi Kumar is a journalist who reports on conflict, politics, development and culture in India and Afghanistan. She tweets at @RuchiKumar