Friday, January 25–Friday, March 8, 2013
Hank Willis Thomas
Branded Head, 2003
LightJet Print
20 x 30 inches
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Curated by Kalia Brooks, OPP: Other People’s Property surveys the work of photo conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas. Across photography, film, sculpture and other media, Thomas recontextualizes the visual languages deployed by advertising and popular culture writ large, considering how contrived visions of beauty perpetuate race and gender-based identities. Re-circulating that imagery, Thomas’s work traces the threads by which identity, ownership, authorship, and commerce grip the body, particularly the black body. In so doing, Thomas understands bodies both as sites of identification and objects of consumption, considering our own formation as consumer-subjects and viewers.
OPP: Other People’s Property is made possible with the support of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Mellon Tri-College Creative Residencies Program. haverford.edu/hcah