Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Hank Willis Thomas - Friday at SFAI




Hank Willis Thomas

Friday, October 3, 2008
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall 800 Chestnut Street (Chestnut at Jones)
7:30 pm

PhotoAlliance and Aperture West Collaborative Lecture Series

INTRODUCTORY PRESENTATION BY CARLA WILLIAMS

Hank Willis Thomas is a visual artist and writer interested in notions of identity perception, commodity culture, and the impact of violence in African American communities.

He received a BFA in photography and Africana studies from New York University and graduated from CCA with an MFA in photography and an MA in visual criticism. Thomas has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; PS1, New York; and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. He is the first recipient of the Aperture West Book Prize, a new annual prize for artists living west of the Mississippi.

His work can be seen currently in the exhibition- Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera which is showing until September 28th at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) in San Francisco.

2 comments:

in fact said...

Don't take this as a complement, but Hank Thomas's work is very disturbing. I am a black woman, and I do not see his point. There is a twisted irony in the things he represents. It is obvious to me what is he trying to get at, but he misses the point. The faux mastercard advertisement is offensive. How can these things be trivialized? Sure, young people die in the pursuits of materialism, but his photographs leave out why. This message is being sent to the wrong people. There is no empathy here. If you look at this and think this is a complete or real representation of a people's experience, than you have it too easy. The reason these subject matters are persistent in society is because people don't question them. They deal with them on a surface level, and guess what? When you do that, these problems will never go away.

dvisser said...

I would suggest that Hank is not trivializing the questions he's asking. Did you have a chance to see his talk? He'd be much more adept at discussing your concerns than I, but my sense is that there is a profound pain and empathy in his work. The photograph here was taken at the funeral of his cousin, Songha, with whom he was extremely close. I hope you'll spend more time with his work on his web site - he also has a show up currently at the DeSaisset Museum in Santa Clara - it's also a piece about Songha's murder called "It's Winter in America."