BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRICAN AMERICAN " HANK WILLIS THOMAS " IS A CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTIST AND PHOTOGRAPHER WHO PRIMARY INTEREST ARE RACE, ADVERTISING AND POPULAR CULTURE : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

BLACK         SOCIAL          HISTORY                                                                                                             Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas (b. March 17, 1976 in Plainfield, NJ) is a contemporary African-American visual artist and photographer whose primary interests are race, advertising and popular culture.

Education

Hank Thomas received an MFA from California College of the Arts, as well as in Visual Criticism. He also received a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in Photography and Africana Studies.

Career

Hank Thomas is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Bla

ckness (November, 2008). His work has been featured in other publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000), and the exhibitions along with accompanying publications 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003), and30 Americans (RFC, 2008).^[1]

He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Galerie Anne De Villepoix in Paris; the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg; P.S.1 Museum in Queens; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; San Francisco; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Roberts & Tilton gallery in Culver City, California; The Gantt Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; The Bronx Museum, Bronx, New York; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, New York; Artists Space, New York; Leica Gallery, New York; Texas Woman’s University; Oakland Museum of California; Smithsonian; Anacostia Museum, Washington, D.C.; Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at NYU; National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., High Museum, Atlanta, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. His collaborative projects have been featured at the Sun dance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include Dress Codes: The International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video, Greater New York at P.S. 1/MoMa, Contact Toronto Photography Festival and Houston Fotofest.

Thomas explores the representation of the African-American male body in visual culture in his B(r)anded Series.^[2][3]

Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the MFA programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

He received a new media fellowship through the Tribeca Film Institute and was an artist in residence at Johns Hopkins University.^[4] He is currently a DuBois Institute Fellow at Harvard University.

Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.

Parents

Thomas's mother, Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is an art photographer and an NYU professor. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow and one of the nation's leading historians of African-American photography and curator of African-American culture. His father, also Hank Thomas, is a jazz musician, film producer, real estate developer and stock broker.