Hank Willis Thomas

Like many around the world I was obsessed with the presidential election campaign of President Barack Obama. Though he went through great lengths to down play it, the most pervasive aspects of his campaign were discussions about the varying degrees of his ethnic identity or identities. He walked the fine line of being ‘black’ but also not ‘too black,’ defining himself as someone equally individual and in sync with the status quo. This dexterity affected me tremendously as an artist dealing with the history of race as it relates to commerce, politics, and popular culture.

Throughout the first year of Obama’s presidency the media has developed sophisticated and often-surreptitious visual and linguistic techniques for discussing race and gender responsibly, though it is well documented that race has no genetic foundation. As an artist and critical thinker, I often attempt to bring history forward as a means to call greater attention to the limited progress society has made in various corridors of intellectual thought. I often revisit ephemera and artifacts from eras past to highlight the ways their visual culture has shaped our popular culture.

The project I propose is entitled, "The Myth of a Black History." I intend to study the iconographical evidence of ‘black’ populations in the Americas from 1619 when the first African slaves came to America through to the present by looking at the way African and other minority populations are pictured today in advertisements, consumer products, illustrations, athletics, film, television and fashion. I am most concerned with how these groups are visualized as other, as opposed to us, throughout the centuries in relation to commercial products and advertising imagery.

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. Employing various media, I 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. I am interested in using Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute, the Hip Hop Archive, as well as the other research facilities at Harvard to examine the evolution of representations of African peoples in the American visual culture landscape.

I often use the ubiquitous language of advertising to identify the many challenges that exist in representing the elusive notion of ‘blackness’--the aim is to expose things that are hiding in plain view of our culture. My recent bodies of work, the Branded^[1] and the Unbranded^[2] series, take two different aesthetic approaches to the theme of the commodification of blackness in the imagery of American popular culture. My work attempts to remind the viewer the power of the storyteller in framing history. Whoever is painting the picture has incalculable influence in shaping our ideas about others as well as ourselves.

I am currently in an exhibition at the Amistad Center for Race and Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum entitled Digging Deeper^[3]. I was invited to produce an exhibition/installation using objects and works from their collection. At the Amistad Collection, there were many points of entry, but my ultimate conclusion was to respond to the archival ephemera in the collection. I was immediately drawn to the Jim Crow postcards, and constructed a “house of cards” from these materials where viewers could see the images on the front of the cards from the outside and walk into the structure to view the messages written on the back. While many of them are especially offensive to viewers today, they were just a normal part of everyday life and culture, not long ago.

My response to this experience speaks to the normality and, indeed, the commodification and circulation of racist ideas in relatively recent mainstream American culture. Once, I began to realize how much one can learn from ephemera, items that could have easily been discarded (e.g. postcards, personal souvenirs, pancake batter boxes, etc.) it caused me to wonder what objects or ways of seeing exist in our present culture that future generations will look back at with bewilderment and shame.

My hope with the DuBois Institute Fellowship is to carry on this type of research, which directly informs my artistic practice, with the goal of exhibiting the results of my work in museums and other venues nationally and abroad. My research as a scholar-in-residence will be incorporated into my lecture presentations and become an integral part of my body of work in the present and will be a continual reference in my intellectual and aesthetic development in the future.

[1]

Branded Series, Branded Head 2003

[2]

Unbranded Series, Smokin’ Joe 1978/2006

[3]

Digging Deeper, “house of cards” 2009