Hank Willis Thomas is an artist who gets people talking–about pop culture, history, and race. For his series, Branded, he co-opted the language and logos of advertisements to produce images that are both personal and provocative. In one piece, the Nike swoosh symbol is etched like a scar on the side of a manʼs bald head. In another, the famous Mastercard “Priceless” slogan appears across a photograph of a family at a graveside funeral. “Gold chain: $400,” the text says. “Bullet: 60 cents. Picking the perfect casket for your son: Priceless.” The family in the photo is the artistʼs own, and they are grieving for his cousin, who was “murdered over a petty commodity,” a gold chain. Thomasʼs images can make you uncomfortable, but they raise important questions about violence, identity, and generalizations reinforced by decades of advertisements.
The work is powerful and irreverent, says guest curator Vince Musi. Thomas isnʼt a journalist, but “heʼs worried about what you want journalism to be worried about–not what celebrities are doing but about major issues.” He believes that photography is a medium of continuous manipulation, particularly in the advertising industry, and he takes that manipulation one step further in his work. In one series, he removes all headlines and text from 1960s magazine ads that feature African-Americans. By stripping away the words, he reveals images that are both humorous and horrifying; images that at a core level, he says, “are a reflection of the way culture views itself or its aspirations.”
Born in 1976 in New Jersey, Thomas began taking photographs at the age of 12. He is the son of photographer and photographic historian Deborah Willis and he grew up in New York around influential photographers like Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. He has had exhibitions in galleries and museums spanning the world – the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Galerie Anne De Villepoix in Paris, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. His work appears in public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Pitch Blackness, his monograph, was published in 2008. He is a fellow at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University and a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.
EXHIBITION
Myth(ology)
May 25 – July 9, 2012
605 East Main Street at the Free Speech Wall
Charlottesvilles, VA
USA
