Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.
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.
Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
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...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
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...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
Mona Lisa Vandalism: Soup Protest Causes Chaos at the Louvre - Artcentron Home » Mona Lisa Vandalism: Soup Protest Causes Chaos at the Louvre ART Feb 1, 2024 Ξ Leave a comment Mona Lisa Vandalism: Soup Protest Causes Chaos at the Louvre posted by ARTCENTRON A close-up shows how the Mona Lisa vandalism raises serious concerns about protection...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Oded 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...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
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...
South 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....
The 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...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera...