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. Related Articles 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 …