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PITCH BLACKNESS
Unraveling the Myth of Race
in Media and Popular Culture
A multimedia lecture
Hank Willis Thomas is considered one of today's most compelling emerging artists. He 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. His book Pitch Blackness is published by Aperture Foundation.

Artist's Statement
"By employing the language of popular culture and advertising in my work, I talk explicitly about race, class and history in a way that is accessible and easy to decode. My intention is to create two-dimensional and digital time-based collage works that bring history forward with relevance to our experience of race, class and gender as conditioned by popular culture."

Willis Thomas's multimedia lecture begins with a deeply personal and interpretive re-telling of the senseless murder of young Songha Willis, the artist's cousin, who was robbed at gunpoint and murdered outside a nightclub in Philadelphia in 2000. Willis Thomas charts his own career as he grapples with the issues of grief, black-on-black violence in America, and the ways in which corporate culture is complicit in the crises of black male identity. He also presents his newest body of work, Unbranded, in which he examines advertising and media representation of African-Americans.

With his characteristic pointedness and dark humor, Willis Thomas shows in Pitch Blackness why he is considered one of today’s most compelling emerging artists.

ABOUT HANK WILLIS THOMAS
HANK WILLIS THOMAS, winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November, 2008), 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 was featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalog, 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American.

He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, New York; Artists Space, New York; Leica Gallery, New York; Texas Woman’s University; Oakland Museum of California; Smithsonian; Anacostia Museum, Washington, D.C.; Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at NYU; National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., among others.

His work is currently on view in group shows at The High Museum, Atlanta and Museum of Fine Art, Houston. His next solo show will open at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, February 2009.

Willis Thomas has produced and co-directed "Along the Way," featured at Oakland, CA Airport, a 20-minute video mosaic that includes over 1,500 videos taken by the artists featuring the people and places of Oakland, California and the surrounding Bay Area.

Visit:

www.causecollective.com

www.hankwillisthomas.com

BLURB
"In the 1960's, artists around the world rose up in protest; they did it in defiance of the existing order of things - rejecting ironclad traditions of all sorts. Good that they did — the world’s a much better place because of it.

As a contemporary photographer protesting the existing order, Hank Willis Thomas, with all fell swoop, has emerged as the voice of his generation. Using razor sharp insight and complex considerations, his work reinscribes the deep structure and the continued importance of identity politics.

From the poignant collaborative series Winter in America to the more recent Unbranded - a brilliant play on the commodification of the black subject— Thomas subverts original intent, creating works of true originality. Hank Willis Thomas proves to be an artist in it for the duration."

—Carrie Mae Weems
Award-winning
photographer and artist.