b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey

Born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and raised in New York, Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual photographer whose work addresses issues of identity, politics, popular culture, and mass media as they pertain to American race relations. He 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).

Thomas’s body of work constructs dialogues around the stereotypical images of African Americans that media outlets seek to exploit and profit from in film and television as well as advertisements for alcohol, apparel, food, hair-care products, and cigarettes, among other items. Thomas situates the photographs within their historical context and addresses how these stereotypes have been pervasive in American culture since the antebellum period. Particularly interested in the literal and figural objectification of the African American male body, Thomas’s B®anded series (2006) appropriates advertising copy and superimposes a Nike swoosh logo onto the bodies of black men, recalling the branding of slaves by their owners. The series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America (2005–08) was a direct response to the B®anded project. Taking mostly magazine ads of African Americans starting in 1968 during the civil rights movement to contemporary times, Thomas digitally stripped the images of all logos and text. In doing so, he allowed for commentary on how the advertising industry commodifies African American identity with even the simplest imagery. Thomas’s photographs draw parallels between the past and present and remind viewers of how dominant cultural tropes continue to shape notions of race and race relations.

In 2012 Thomas became Institute Fellow at Columbia College, Chicago, as part of his concurrent video installation project, Question Bridge: Black Males (2012), a collaboration with artists Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair. The work is 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. Thomas has had solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2009); Baltimore Museum of Art (2009); Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2010); and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2011). His work has appeared in group exhibitions, including those at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (2007); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2008); Museum of Art and Design, New York (2010); and the Istanbul Biennial (2011). His first monograph, Pitch Blackness (2008), garnered him the first annual Aperture West Book Prize. Thomas lives and works in New York.