Artist Statement
Hank Willis Thomas
Artist 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 use the familiar or Roland Barthes’ ‘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. My work attempts to explore how visual culture of the past affects and intersects with our current world-view, often creating correlations between African American historical challenges and the present. My work brings history forward with relevance to our experience of race, class and gender as conditioned by popular culture. My goal is to subvert the common understanding of black history as somehow extracted from American history, and reinstate it as indivisible from the totality of past social, political, and economic occurrences that make up contemporary culture.

 

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