‘And only the people………’
Galerie Henrik Springmann Berlin
April 26 till June 12.
Artist Statement
By employing the language of popular culture and advertising in his work, Hank Willis Thomas talks explicitly about race, class and history in a way that is accessible and easy to decode. His intention is to 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. Considering the complexities of historical and contemporary issues, Hank Willis Thomas’ work attempts to explore how visual culture of the past affects and intersects with our current world-view, often creating correlations between African American historical challenges and the present. Thomas creates two-dimensional, sculptural, and digital time-based collage works that bring history forward with relevance to our experience of race, class and gender as conditioned by popular culture.