Hank Willis Thomas

"A person is more important than anything else…," is driven by the cadence and intonation of James Baldwin’s voice, for Baldwin was also an orator whose delivery was almost as forceful as his ideas. Artist Hank Willis Thomas weaves various audio, images, and video together including news clips, speeches, and interviews, in a fluid-moving, digital stream of consciousness that connects Baldwin’s 20th century discourse with the concerns and urgencies of the 21st, highlighting issues of race, gender, class and sexuality. Commissioned in 2014 by NY Live Arts for the Year of James Baldwin, this multi-channel installation brings history to the fore, inspiring us to re-imagine our relationship to the contemporary moment.

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multiple forms: a gallery installation, a website, a book, and a curriculum. It presents diverse experiences of Black men through a video question-and-answer exchange, a “question bridge,” to break down stereotypes of Black male identity perpetuated by America’s white dominant culture. Thomas and his collaborators traveled across the United States, recording questions from nearly 160 men, bringing the questions to others to answer, and filming additional questions from those respondents that other participants, in turn, could later address. The project enables a large group of men to speak to each other across geographic, economic, political, and generational divisions.

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Winter in America is a stop-motion animation video that recreates the events leading up to the robbing and murder of Hank Willis Thomas’s cousin, Songha, in February 2000 outside a club in Philadelphia. Basing the narrative on eye-witness accounts, the artists use G.I. Joe action figures, similar to those they played with during childhood, to tell the story. The video examines a culture in which young boys are encouraged to act out such violent scenarios before they can even read. More generally, it is critical of America’s unquenchable thirst for material goods.

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An introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today, inspired by the late David Driskell's landmark 1976 exhibition, "Two Centuries of Black American Art."

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An eager young artist receives a disturbing introduction to the art world during the delivery of a controversial sculpture.

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