Black Power, 2006

by Hank Willis Thomas

Description
"My goal with the work is to employ the familiar, or what-goes-without-saying, to draw connections and provoke conversations about issues and histories that are often forgotten or avoided in our commerce-infused daily lives."

—Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas is the winner of the first Aperture West Book Prize, an initiative announced in January 2007 to raise awareness of photographers based in the American West. For the first winner, the selection committee opted to highlight an emerging artist, Hank Willis Thomas, whose first monograph, Pitch Blackness (Aperture, 2008), was published as a result of the award. Willis Thomas gained wide recognition with his highly provocative series B®ANDED, which addresses the commodification of African-American male identity by raising questions about visual culture and the power of logos.

Willis Thomas's work grapples with issues of grief, black-on-black violence, the contributions of corporate culture to the crises of black male identity, and African-American representation in advertising and media. René de Guzman writes of Willis Thomas in her contribution to Pitch Blackness that he "is most closely aligned with the pioneering African-American artists of the 1970s and '80s, such as Carrie Mae Weems and Deborah Willis (the artist's mother, who is also an acclaimed photographer, scholar, and curator), and his immediate predecessors Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker."

Some have categorized Willis Thomas's work as belonging to the "postblack" genre, where racist stereotypes are reinterpreted or reconstructed. With his characteristic pointedness and dark humor, Willis Thomas creates a visual dialogue about the pressing issues of race, representation, and a sort of present-day enslavement-through-consumerism as it applies to African-American youth. Willis Thomas's work is heavily informed by the tragic loss of his young cousin, Songha Willis Thomas, who was murdered by another black man outside a Philadelphia nightclub in an incident of violence involving a gold chain, an event the artist credits with helping him find his "artistic focus."
Details

Digital C-Print
Image Size: 20 x 16 inches
Paper Size: 20 x 16 inches
Edition of 30 + 5 AP
Signed and numbered by the artist

About the Artist

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey) received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been featured at Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AK; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA, among others.

Major group exhibitions of his work include the 2017 inaugural show at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Zacheta National Museum of Art, Poland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County, CA.

Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.

He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.

In 2019, Thomas unveiled his permanent work “Unity” in Brooklyn, NY. In 2017, “Love Over Rules” permanent neon was unveiled in San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” in Opa Locka, FL. His first monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. A survey of his work, Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal was copublished by Aperture and the Portland Art Museum in 2018. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.

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