Dimensions variable
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.
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.
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
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...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
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...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
For I use 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 (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
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...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...