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    Hank Willis Thomas: LOVERULES - From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

     
    Upper Level Galleries
    February 24, 2024 — July 21, 2024

    “The most revolutionary thing a person can do is be open to change.”

    Hank Willis Thomas
    Well known as a conceptual artist and activist, Hank Willis Thomas’s (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) practice focuses on themes relating to commodity, identity, media, and popular culture. Though Thomas uses a range of media, his central conceptual tool is photographic, namely, he employs the imagery of popular visual and consumer culture to take on urgent contemporary questions: What is the role of art for civic life? How does visual culture create narratives that shape our notion of who counts in society?
    This exhibition of 90 works, drawn from the collection of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, spans over 20 years of Thomas’s work—it is one of the largest presentations of the artist’s long-standing career. While not intended as a comprehensive survey, it touches on his most significant practices and themes: the impact of corporate branding, the construction of gender and race, and the struggle for liberty and equality. Individual artworks include photography, print, mixed-media, neon, and sculpture. The exhibition also highlights several series, including Branded and Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America. In the latter, Thomas strips iconic images drawn from the language of advertising of their text and product, thus highlighting the consistently dehumanizing strategies of corporate media, the commodification of African American identity, and the ways in which dominant cultural tropes shape notions of race and race relations.
    Critical awareness, civic engagement, inclusive collaboration, and empathy are among the core invitations of Thomas’s work. Through the mining and reframing of iconic imagery and texts, Thomas connects historical moments of resistance to our lives today. With incisive clarity, he asks us to see and challenge systems of inequality while affirming our shared humanity to shape a better future.

    Artist Bio

    Born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and raised in New York, Hank Willis Thomas earned a BFA in photography and Africana studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (1998) and a MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2004). Additionally, he has received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine.
    Thomas’s work has been exhibited internationally and is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among others. Thomas is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship award winner. He has been an instructor in the MFA program at Yale University and Maryland Institute College of Art and is a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York. His first monograph, Pitch Blackness (2008), garnered him the first annual Aperture West Book Prize.
    Influenced by social history and the hard-fought, perennial battle for equality in all areas of his work, Thomas co-founded For Freedoms with artist Eric Gottesman in 2016 as a platform for creative civic engagement in America. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941)—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—For Freedoms uses art to encourage and deepen public explorations of freedom in the 21st century.
    Thomas lives and works in New York.
    CREDITS

    Hank Willis Thomas: LOVERULES - From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs.