Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist's interdisciplinary output, incorporating all aspects of his practice, with a particular focus on the work's relationship to the photographic image and to issues of representation and perception. Contextualized with incisive essays by Portland Art Museum curators Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski and art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and an in-depth interview between Dr. Kellie Jones and the artist that elaborates on Thomas's influences and inspirations.
"From Hans Bellmer's grotesquely assembled poupée seductresses in the 1930s-40s to Todd Haynes's 1987 banned masterpiece "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" told with Barbie dolls, artists have frequently turned to the seeming benignity of childhood toys in order to explore the darker realities of adult behavior and desire. For Winter in America, Hank Willis Thomas and collaborator Kambui Olujimi use the dolls Thomas and Willis played with as children, carefully stored for years in a friend's basement. Yet these toys are no longer fantasy objects; Thomas and Olujimi are able to create a gripping tableau because in their attention to detail they achieve such unnerving authenticity."-- from the afterword by Carla WilliamsChallenging and thought-provoking, the photographs in Winter in America are taken from the video collaboration of the same name, a stop-motion animation short film based on the murder of Songha Thomas Willis, who was killed outside of Club Evolutions in Philadelphia on February 2, 2000. Both elements enlist G.I. Joe action figures that the artists once used to create similar violent narratives as children. The packaging for the action figures reads, "for children ages 5+," even though they all come with guns. Through this project the artists examine the breeding of a culture of violence in young boys, who are invited to author violent scenarios before they can even read.
"As a contemporary photographer protesting the existing order, Hank Willis Thomas has emerged as the voice of his generation. Using razor sharp insight and complex considerations, his work reinscribes the deep structure and the continued importance of identity politics.--[book cover].
Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Mar. 10-June 5, 2011, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Calif. Oct. 23, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012 and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Tex. Feb.-May 2012.
Baz Dreisinger travels behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist, and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline, Dreisinger looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and women and those who imprison them, creating a jarring, poignant view of a world to which most are denied access, and a rethinking of one of America’s most far-reaching global exports: the modern prison complex. From serving as a restorative justice facilitator in a notorious South African prison and working with genocide survivors in Rwanda, to launching a creative writing class in an overcrowded Ugandan prison and coordinating a drama workshop for women prisoners in Thailand, Dreisinger examines the world behind bars with equal parts empathy and intellect. She journeys to Jamaica to visit a prison music program, to Singapore to learn about approaches to prisoner reentry, to Australia to grapple with the bottom line of private prisons, to a federal supermax in Brazil to confront the horrors of solitary confinement, and finally to the so-called model prisons of Norway. Incarceration Nations concludes with climactic lessons about the past, present, and future of justice.
Shows that the history of black photographers intertwines with the story of African American life, as seen through photographs ranging from antebellum weddings and 1960s protest marches, to portraits of contemporary black celebrities.
"Gordon Parks's spectacular rise from poverty, personal hardships, and outright racism is astounding and inspiring." --from the foreword by Wing Young Huie
"This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts."
A timely consideration of African-American artists' rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century, this book is the winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History. Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--explores the connections and frictions around modernism in the works of artists such as Romare Bearden, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold, Renee Cox, Robert Colescott, Norman Lewis, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems and Henri Matisse. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international and intergenerational connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.
How to Build a Monument / Paul M. Farber -- Memorializing Philadelphia as a Place of Crisis and Boundless Hope / Ken Lum -- Public Practice / Jane Golden -- Tania Bruguera, Monument to New Immigrants -- Mel Chin, Two Me -- Kara Crombie, Sample Philly -- The Art of the Proposal: Reading the Monument Lab Open Data Set / Laurie Allen.
