Palm Springs, CA
Works of art are meant to be encountered in person. A screen can hint, but it can’t deliver scale, surface, light, or the quiet physical fact of standing in front of something someone made with their hands. We experience the world through our senses—seeing, hearing, touch, even the awareness of space and distance—and our bodies are the conduit. Art comes from that same human channel: artists translating what they notice, what they feel, and what they can’t quite name yet into form. In The Female Form, you’re invited into two distinctly American perspectives—Tom Wesselmann and Mickalene Thomas—each presenting the women they depict with a different set of choices, values, and emotional signals. Seeing them side by side doesn’t give you a single conclusion; it gives you a living comparison.
Tom Wesselmann (a defining Pop artist of the 1960s and 70s) aimed to make figurative art feel as electrifying as abstraction—bold, graphic, saturated, impossible to ignore. Mickalene Thomas, working in our own moment, builds images that insist on agency: Black women presented with presence, style, self-possession, and a kind of unapologetic “I’m here” power that art history has too often denied them.
Why this pairing works
At first glance, you might think: two artists, nude figures, conversation over. But the real story is what happens when you notice how differently they answer the same question: What does it mean to be seen?
Wesselmann’s world is the billboard-bright America of consumer color and clean-edged desire—beauty amplified, cropped, staged, sometimes anonymous, sometimes intimately sourced from real relationships. The work can feel seductive and confrontational at the same time, because it doesn’t pretend innocence about pleasure, power, or projection.
Thomas’s world is more like walking into someone’s lived atmosphere—pattern, texture, glamour, memory, interior space—where the women aren’t being “arranged” for you so much as arriving in front of you. And part of what makes this exhibition quietly thrilling is that she didn’t come to Wesselmann as a stranger: while studying at Pratt, she researched his work in his archives and carried that influence forward into a language that is unmistakably her own.
A museum show that rewards your full body
Art in a book or catalogue, is not an art experience. It’s simply a teaser, to entice you, and get your attention to see it in person. That is the way they should be experienced. Scale and color matters.. Surface, and texture inform. Distance places you right in front of it and allows you to experience from different positions. The way a rhinestone catches light across a room is not the way it looks up close. The way color can create an emotional response in person—like a spotlight you can’t step out of—has to be seen.
And because the subject is the nude, your own presence becomes part of the experience. You bring your personal history, your comfort level, your questions, your assumptions. That’s not a problem—it’s the point.
How to see it without being told what to think
People sometimes talk about the nude in museums as if it’s automatically “above” ordinary human feeling—safe, refined, almost sacred. That’s a convenient story, but it’s not quite true. The nude isn’t special because it’s sanitized; it’s special because it’s honest. It puts vulnerability, desire, power, dignity, sexuality and the sense of anticipation in the same room. It asks you to notice what the image is really doing. In a museum, the question isn’t “Is this allowed?” The question is: Who is being seen, by whom, and on whose terms? Once you start looking that way, the nude stops being a taboo or a loophole—it becomes a mirror.
When I used to guide students through museums, the giggles always showed up right on schedule, around nude figures. So I’d stop and ask them, one question that changed everything:
“Tell me what you see.”
Not what you’ve heard you’re supposed to see. Not what someone else told you it means; this is art. Tell me what do you actually see—line, color, posture, confidence, vulnerability, performance, pride, distance, invitation, refusal? And how does it make you feel; embarrassed, inquisitive, invaded, threatened, or sexually aroused. And that’s exactly why the nude is such a powerful teacher—because it reveals how we look, not just what we look at.
That same question unlocks this exhibition for adults, too. Because once you start looking in that way, the show stops being “about nudity” and becomes something richer: a live comparison of who holds power in an image—and how that power shifts across time, culture, and identity.
A small teaser I won’t over-explain
In the exhibit you’ll encounter Thomas presenting iconic figures—Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice among them—in a way that honors stature without sanding down complexity, holding power and femininity in the same frame.
And you’ll meet Wesselmann’s Pop-era seduction, where the body can become a symbol, landscape, commodity, or theater—often all at once. Or where a truncated view of body parts, a hand holding a cigarette, or a foot extended implies something larger.
That is all I’m going to tell you. I’m not going to include a bunch of the exhibit text. Including it the article may color your thinking. I’ll leave the exhibit text, for you to read yourself.
The rest of the exhibit deserves to be discovered at walking pace.
The real gift of a museum isn’t that it tells you what matters—it’s that it gives you the time and space to find out what matters to you. In a world where images arrive in a rush—selected, cropped, ranked, and pushed in front of your eyes—walking into a gallery can feel like stepping out of a current. Your attention comes back to your own body. At your own pace. Your own inner voice. No feed. No forced sequence. No one else decides what you should feel before you’ve even had the experience.
That’s where your personal aesthetic is formed—not as a rulebook you inherit, but as a relationship you build. It’s the slow accumulation of what you’re drawn to, what you resist, what you trust, what you question, what moves you, and what leaves you cold. A museum lets you practice that relationship in real time. You get to stand in front of a work long enough for the first reaction—approval, discomfort, attraction, skepticism, curiosity—to fade into something more honest. Then you can ask the only questions that really matter: What do I see? What do I feel? What is this work asking of me—and what am I willing to give it? And once you answer, you don’t need permission for that answer to be valid. It’s yours.
So take the time. Walk in. Breathe. Let the room slow you down. Go see “The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas” and experience it for yourself—then let your own eye be the authority for your personal aesthetic.
Note: The Female Form: Tom Wesselmann & Mickalene Thomas is on view at Palm Springs Art Museum (Main Museum) from November 22, 2025 through April 6, 2026, drawn from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.
About the Author
Marty Treinen is the co-founder of Creative Core International and the co-creator of Universal Creative Intelligence™ (UCI), a groundbreaking framework that teaches people of all ages the creative, emotional, and cognitive skills needed for lifelong success. An artrepreneur, arts/museum educator, and project leader, Marty draws on a decades-long career spanning fine arts, theater, film, design, and art & museum education.
Marty and co-author Dr. D. Wesley Spencer wrote the forthcoming books “AI and the Human Equation: How the Arts and Sciences Shape the Future of Education” and
‘Who Controls AI? Collaboration or Domination: The Standards and Human Skills That Shape Our Future”
They are currently developing UCI programs for schools, universities, and businesses.
Their mission is simple: equip people with the creative intelligence to build the future they envision for themselves.
As a columnist for The Palm Springs Tribune, Marty covers theater, film, visual and performing arts, human-centric AI, arts education and cultural events throughout the Coachella Valley. His reviews are known for their honesty, authenticity, clarity, and deep respect for the power of the arts, to enhance our lives.