Art Fact Friday #34 Hank Willis Thomas
- William Mandela Matthews
- Mar 22, 2024
- 2 min read
An artist who produces art pieces in a multitude of media including sculpture, screen-printing, neon, mixed media, and installation art. This artist works are chactercized by a mangnification of mass media, identity, popular culture, and perspective. The artist invites viewers to examine commercial representation connection to racial stereotypes. By investigating the blue print of myths, and images that reinforce economic and racial prejudice, as exemplified by mass media, advertising, and popular culture the artist fully engages viewers. The artist has exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. The artist has also contributed to collaborative projects including Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms.
Born March 17,1976 in Plainfield NJ, Hank Willis Thomas began as a Museum Studies student at Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Thomas went on to receive a B.F.A.in Photography and Africana studies from New York University, New York, NY 1998 and a M.A./M.F.A. in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA 2004. Thomas was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award in 2006. In 2007 he was named the Renew Media Arts Fellow by the Rockefeller Foundation. 2008 His work “Pitch Blackness” received the first Aperture West Book Prize. “Question Bridge: Black Males” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival 2012. The film recieved the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute.
Thomas co-founded a platform for creative civic engagement “For Freedoms” in 2016. In 2017 Thomas was awarded the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize and a Soros Equality Fellowship. Also in 2017 he received an honorary doctorate in the Visual Arts from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD as well as the Institute for Doctoral Studies, Portland, ME. His works “Love Over Rules” San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” Opa Locka, FL were also unveiled. 2018, Thomas received The Guggenheim Fellowship.The Gordon Parks Foundation awarded Thomas a fellowship in 2019. Additionally a comprehensive exhibition of his works Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal displayed at the Portland Art Museum, 2019. Another of Thomas’s permanent pieces “Unity” unveiled in Brooklyn, NY, 2019. In 2023, "The Embrace" ;a 20 foot high bronze sculpture honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King was unveiled at the 1965 Freedom Plaza in Boston, MA.
Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY he is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium. Thomas has served as an instructor at Maryland Institute College of Art, ICP/Bard, Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.
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