Hank Willis Thomas

by Isolde Brielmaier

The photographs of Hank Willis Thomas are particularly relevant in today’s consumption driven society in which ideas of race, class, gender and memory are both blatantly and subtly constructed and enmeshed in targeted marketing and products. In general terms, Hank’s art speaks to the broad issues of consumption and the focused nature of advertising to particular populations here in the United States.

More specifically, however, Hank’s images explore the tenuous relationship between history, the body, race, class and commercial markets, examining the ways in which each of these aspects comes to bear on the carefully and intentionally developed products, logos and corresponding ad campaigns.

Hank’s installation here at Artists Space is responding to the underlying commercial messages embedded within today’s fresh, polished and targeted marketing. Yet, it also makes clear the direct and critical connection between a consumer’s experience within a store—one in which his/her attention is drawn to different areas of merchandising and store displays and to a range of products, logos, color, size and material options—and the world outside this commercial environment.
The “outside world” is coded in Hank’s alteration and/or enhancement of logos so that his “products” draw on memory and present provocative historical and racial references. For example, throughout the African-American historical landscape of the U.S., cotton was and today quite literally remains “the fabric of our lives”; a commodity produced and cultivated by slave labor and later marketed to and consumed heavily by the very population upon which the cotton industry’s historical success rests. Hank’s works featuring the cotton logo are further complicated by his addition of Nike’s Air Jordan logo, drawing connections between race, the economy and the black male body as both an itinerant billboard spectacle and a site of societal ambivalence.

By changing something such as a product logo—something that we immediately recognize—Hank’s art is cause for pause. It provokes us to think and re-consider what we see and what many of us so readily consume. Above all, Hank’s work elicits questions and conversations about visual culture, the significance of commodities and the power of logos—or what Hank himself calls a “curious international language” that is loaded with complex ideas and meanings that catch our attention, secure social value, rouse our desires and motivate us to pay cash.

In effort to get at some of the specific details of Hank’s installation here at Artists Space, brief excerpts from a conversation between the artist and curator are included below.

On advertising and logos:
“I’ve always been fascinated with the ad industry and the glossiness of advertising…I think that it has become somewhat of an international language. In many ways, logos and brands are the hieroglyphs of today’s generation—you can pretty much go anywhere and those who are savvy will see a particular logo and know what it means. I like to imagine logos as a certain type of artifact and I wonder what sort of deductions people will make about our society when they look back at our logos.”

On the black male body:
“I think that the irony of the ideal of the black male body is interesting…it is fetishized and adored in advertising but in reality black men are in many ways the most feared and hated bodies of the 21st Century. The majority of this work comes out of the experience of losing my cousin Songha Thomas Willis – he was killed because he was with someone who was wearing a gold chain. It is this idea – that someone could be killed over a tiny commodity. In NYC in the 1980s, people were killed over sneakers and backpacks. Songha was someone who survived DC when it was the murder capital of the country and then came home to Philly and was killed over a commodity. I want to question what makes these commodities so precious that they are worth defining and more importantly taking another person’s life?”

The image of the Ball and Chain, 2003:
“The ball and chain…My cousin was seen as his family’s gem, their hope– he got into all of these private schools because he could play sports. But when he got injured, he stop getting recruitment letters from schools like Princeton. He decided that he really didn’t want to play ball, but then it seemed like he had few other options. This is the story behind my photograph of the ball and chain…one’s hopes are chained to something beyond one’s reach…”

The image of the Branded Chest, 2003:
“Here I was interested in how slaves were branded as a means of designating ownership. Now we [many African-American men] choose to brand ourselves by actually hot branding our bodies and by wearing logos or “brands.” It then becomes interesting to consider who really owns us? When we invest 2/3 of our money [often from very small incomes] in these brands, what might this mean? I also find it curious that the word “brand” is used to define the logos but it is also the term used in reference to property, particularly in reference to U.S. slavery.

On the language of advertising, commodities and art:
“My dilemma is that I want to use the language of advertising that isn’t necessarily specific to the language of the commodity. But the art world is a commercial market – so in order to continue doing work, I have to participate within this market. I guess you could say that this is hypocritical…but I have to do it in order to produce my art.
In my work, I am not trying to pass judgments, but rather I am interested in asking questions and in creating a dialogue…When a white friend of mine who was walking in Harlem was wearing a t-shirt that featured Jordan being lynched from a Timberland tree and a black guy comes up and asks him about the shirt, it was up to that white guy to explain his thoughts about it. It is this sort of dialogue that I am after.