Hank Willis Thomas

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.

"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].

Artists have long been stimulated and motivated by the work of those who came before them—sometimes, centuries before them. Interviews with 120 international contemporary artists discussing works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection that spark their imagination shed new light on art-making, museums, and the creative process. Images of works from The Met collection appear alongside images of the contemporary artists' work, allowing readers to discover a rich web of visual connections that spans cultures and millennia.

"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.

A monograph on the work of American-Canadian artist Suzy Lake. Lake's work uses a range of media to explore ideas of identity. In collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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.

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.