Hank Willis Thomas American, b. 1976

Hank Willis Thomas, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1976, works across photography, sculpture, textile and installation to interrogate race, identity and injustice in American visual culture. His practice centres on the ways advertising and mass media commodify Black bodies, particularly in sport and entertainment. By appropriating commercial imagery and stripping it of branding – a process he calls ‘unbranding’ – Thomas reveals how stereotypes are encoded in the language of marketing. His work invites a critical re-reading of cultural assumptions that are often accepted as neutral or inevitable, highlighting the machinery behind the production of race in capitalist societies.

Thomas studied at New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, where he received a BFA in photography and Africana studies in 1998. He went on to obtain an MFA in photography and an MA in visual criticism from the California College of Arts in Oakland in 2004. Thomas’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the International Center of Photography Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town. His work is held numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; 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) and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. More recently, Thomas’s The Embrace was unveiled in Boston Common, a 20-foot-tall sculpture, created in collaboration with MASS Design Group. Thomas is a recipient of 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).

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