Black Hands, White Cotton

2014 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Hank Willis Thomas

location: New York, New York
year born: 1976
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Plainfield, New Jersey

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:



Condition Report
© » KADIST

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From Useless Wonder 04
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Carlos Amorales

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Produced 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...

No World
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

2014

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The Tower of Babel: The Carnaval
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Du Zhenjun

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The White Album
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Mungo Thomson

2008

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Cinema
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

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Untitled (TIME)
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Mungo Thomson

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Walead Beshty

2010

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram...

Subject, Silver, Prism
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Brian Jungen

2011

There are several elements to Subject, Silver, Prism ...

Oakland Girls
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Pascal Shirley

2006

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...

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Wong Wai Yin

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Untitled #1 #2 #3
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Piero Golia

2007

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...

Cityscapes 1 (boats), 2 (woods)
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Hamra Abbas

2010

At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...

I used to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance
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Daniel Joseph Martinez

1978

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Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion)
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Adrian Wong

2012

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...

I can’t believe we are still protesting
© » KADIST

Wong Wai Yin

2021

Drawn 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...