Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture, often seeking out and utilizing recognizable icons from popular branding and marketing campaigns.

His body of work engages the stereotypical images of African Americans in film, television, and advertisements, investigating their historical context and their lineage in American culture since the antebellum period. His works include the B®anded series, which appropriates advertising copy and superimposes a Nike swoosh logo onto the bodies of black men, recalling the branding of slaves by their owners; and the collaborative project Question Bridge: Black Males, an accumulation of interviews with hundreds of African American men throughout the United States documenting their views on a range of subjects such as family, love, education, and community during the Barack Obama administration.

His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Hong Kong Arts Center, California African American Museum, and Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. His awards include the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Aperture West Brook Prize. He holds an MFA in photography and an MA in visual criticism from the California College of the Arts.