Black Hands, White Cotton
2014 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Hank Willis Thomas
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title. As with many of his works, the artist has taken a found image and manipulated it to draw out and dramatize the formal contrast between the black hands holding white cotton. Cotton, of course is one of the most familiar fabric sources to us, and becomes incredibly soft once processed. But at the time that it was being planted and picked by slaves in the United States, was severely abrasive and would lacerate the hands of the slaves dramatically. Not to mention the physical labor involved in picking cotton out in the sweltering hot fields for inhumane periods of time, and the frequent physical abuse endured by slaves in the process. This image, culled from the archives of Jive magazine in San Francisco, and blown up to a pixelated scale therefore demands not only that we confront the history of slavery and racism in the US, but does so by presenting a formal contradiction of a material that appears seductive, glamorous, and ornamental, but of a subject that represents extreme violence and oppression.
Employing the visual language and terminology of mass media, and appropriating symbols and images from popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas’ work seeks to question and subvert established definitions and positions with regards to personal identity and the narrative of race. Working across installation, photography, video, and media work, Thomas maintains his photo conceptualist roots, primarily taking source material from found photographs and archives. These images form the basis from which the artist seeks to uncover the fallacies that history claims as truth. His work illustrates how the way history is represented and consumed reinforces generalizations surrounding identity, gender, race and ethnicity, and that as an artist he has an opportunity to expose or to revise those histories from the points of view of the oppressed.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » born 1976, » california college of the arts alumni, » contemporary artist, » conceptual artist, » african-american photographers
» see more
© » KADIST
Leslie Shows
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage...
© » KADIST
Laure Prouvost
2018Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018)...
Related works featuring themes of: » Advertising and Brands, » Cultural Commentary, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Cultural Identity, » Mass Media, » Appropriation Art, » Racial Identity, » Collective History, » Color Photography, » American
» see more
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Pascal Shirley
2006Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
© » KADIST
Wong Wai Yin
2021Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2005Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Maria Fernanda Plata
2015Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle...
© » KADIST
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe
2019Perawesi / Estómago de animal / Stomach of animal by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe exemplify his most abstract work, where he choses particular elements of a living organism to create his renditions...
© » KADIST
James "Yaya" Hough
2016This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate...
Related works from the » 2010's created around » New York, New York
» see more
© » KADIST
Chris Wiley
2012Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
© » KADIST
Oded Hirsch
2012Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
© » KADIST
Stephen G. Rhodes
2010For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame...
Other works by: » Hank Willis Thomas
» see more
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2014South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2013The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Related artist(s) to: Hank Willis Thomas » Abraham Cruzvillegas, » Claire Fontaine, » William E Jones, » Catherine Opie, » Collier Schorr, » Glenn Ligon, » Harun Farocki, » Jens Hoffmann, » Kirsten Pieroth
» see more
© » KADIST
Claire Fontaine
2006Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
© » KADIST
Glenn Ligon
2000Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
© » KADIST
Collier Schorr
2013In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Dread Scott
2022In conjunction with his first NFT sale of White Male Dread Scott made and circulated a poster titled Whites For Sale ...
© » KADIST
Mathieu Abonnenc
2021The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement...
