An interview with Hank Willis Thomas
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Hank Willis Thomas’ cousin Songha was the model older brother—talented and charming, he won many academic and athletic honors before almost finishing up a degree in communications to pursue a career in broadcasting. At age 27, his life ended outside a Philadelphia nightclub, where two men held Songha and two friends at gunpoint. Songha had not resisted. He lay prone on the icy floor when one of the gunman, after having taken some money and jewelry, shot him in the back of the head. For the Willis family, Songha’s death, however painful and senseless, was not without meaning. Hank thought about the circumstances of his cousin’s murder—who else but a black male would end another black male’s life over some jewelry?

To make some sense of his loss, Hank began thinking of broader conditions and root causes of Songha’s death. Winter in America, a memorial piece dedicated to Songha, explores the phenomenon of black on black violence. Sourcing eyewitness accounts and notes taken by Songha’s mother, Hank produced a short film recreating the night of his cousin’s death. The project, rendered through stop-motion animation, uses G.I. Joe action figures to frame the innocuous play of children as violent narratives to be acted out in real life.

Over the years, Hank has produced a large body of work exploring the concept of blackness in America. With a critical eye, he opens up new ways of perceiving mainstream culture through unexpected reappropriations of popular advertising. In Hank’s work, brands like Puma, Timberland, Nike and the NBA seem to perpetuate models of blackness predicated on economic exploitation. His repurposed images reveal historical narratives of black America obscured and reinforced by contemporary consumerist culture, unveiling the ways in which advertising works by unspoken coercion.

His first published monograph, Pitch Blackness, won the first annual Aperture West Book Prize, which honors and promotes the work of Western-based photographers. Before embarking on a flight to Italy, he discussed over the phone issues explored by his work—advertising, commerce, race and politics in America.

EM: Tell me a little about what you’ll be doing in Europe.

I have two exhibitions in Italy right now, one in Naples and one in a town called Bolzano. I’m doing a talk in Bolzano. I don’t know much beyond that, actually. It’s part of an exhibition called Black Atlantic. I haven’t really given a talk in Europe before so it’ll be interesting to see how the work translates in a different culture and language.

EM: How was reception to your work in past European shows?

Because you don’t understand the language, you can’t tell if people are really getting what your work is about, but American culture’s so pervasive that there are certain ideas that translate anyway.

EM: Since advertising is so ubiquitous, I imagine that the language of your work is still accessible to a foreign audience.

I hope so, but at the same time I know for a fact that race is especially different in non-English speaking Europe. They have a very different relationship to race, so the exotification of the black body comes from a different perspective. You’ll see things that would really be offensive or shocking in their advertisements that are part of everyday things there. The idea of the exotic other is just part of their culture.

EM: The outerwear company Weatherproof recently put up a billboard on Times Square with a photo of President Obama wearing one of their jackets in front of the Great Wall of China. This was done without the approval of the White House. What do you think of the way in which artists and advertisers have had almost free reign over the use of images? Is this a good or bad thing?

I think it’s all of the above. Part of the reason that appropriation is a popular theme in art is a lack of creativity. That would be the bad. The good is the fact that we live in a time where visual culture is going through something similar that music was about thirty years ago, when people were figuring out how to make music out of other music, mixing and layering tracks, having a vocabulary of different sounds by combining them. I think that a lot of artists are doing that visually, knowing that we can take an image—because so many people are affected by advertising. I’m at the airport now and there’s just ads everywhere and it affects our lives and culture so much it’s kind of a one-way conversation. That appropriation allows us to take control of the language that’s always spoken to us so we can say something different or unique or in contrast to what the original intent was. I think that would be the goal. We also live in a time where where you can take a picture of the President wearing your jacket and sell it. I guess that would mean nothing is sacred. All of us live in a marketing-infused culture, meaning that advertising’s always working off of something, most likely something that came out of fine art history.

EM: Have companies contacted you about legal issues regarding the logos you’ve used in your work?

I have not had any legal issues thus far, but I suspect partly because the time we live in and also because the concept of my work isn’t something that a corporation would want to give higher or greater exposure to. I think the issues that are in my work, they wouldn’t want to have a legal debate over. Another thing I figured out is that even when I’m using a corporate logo in a way that may not be flattering to them or may be complicated, the old adage still rings true—there’s no such thing as bad press. Even if there might be the Absolut logo in galleries and museums and it becomes part of the culture in a way that they don’t even pay for, it’s yet another part of the product.

EM: Your work touches on how African-American men have been exploited and infantilized through advertising. I thought of this while seeing recent NBA ads with puppets of Kobe and Lebron—the way in which popular perceptions of black males are reinforced both intentionally and unintentionally.

First, it’s interesting when you talk about the puppets of Kobe and Lebron. One thing that’s fascinating about the time we live in, especially for someone Lebron James’ age, is that you’re coming of age with African-Americans really present in sports and entertainment and also a black president, which means that in a way you see—and also obviously with the huge representation of African-Americans in crime-related activities—you see African-Americans across the whole spectrum of American life, which I think makes everything much harder to tell what’s good or bad.

EM: The images and iconography you use in your work make for juxtapositions that make sense in frightening ways. How did you first become aware of such coded meanings within advertising?

There’s a movie that came out a long time ago, with “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. It’s called They Live. In the movie, aliens have taken over the planet and when [Roddy Piper] puts on these special glasses, he can see the subliminal meanings of ads. It’s a commentary on how advertising’s a form of mind control. Even though I was only 10 or 11 when I saw it and it was a pretty stupid movie, it made me realize that when you’re looking at an advertisement you’re never really looking at the product. It’s really trying to take disparate ideas—like maybe a beautiful woman and a guy with a bottle of water. Because she’s holding it, I guess that by drinking that drink, he has done it with her. As I grew older and having always been—my mother’s a photographer and art curator—I have always been aware of the power of images to manipulate perspectives, because so much of her work as an art historian has been about how African-Americans have photographed themselves very differently from how mainstream populations have photographed African-Americans. African-Americans have photographed themselves and each other in very dignified and humanistic ways, whereas mainstream culture has always been about the reduction of African-Americans as comic relief. I think the combination of pop culture and the education I got from my mother is part of it.

EM: Did your graduate studies in Visual Criticism help you to articulate your ideas in anyway? How did you end up studying theory along with photography?

In high school, I was in this museum studies program, which was interesting in an art high school to be not making art but to be thinking about how to put ideas and images together to say something. When I went to college in NYU, I was a photography major. Since I wasn’t naturally doing as much academics as I should have, I forced myself to do a double major in Africana Studies so I can write and think about other issues that were important to me. When I was in grad school at [California College of the Arts], I was getting an MFA in photography but then I decided to stay longer and get a second degree, which was an M.A. in Visual Criticism, and that’s what really gave me a lot of the vocabulary to talk about my work.

EM: Your Rebranded series features minstrel imagery that works to devalue and emasculate foreign cultures. In recent decades, do you think that this has passed on from targeting African-Americans to Arab-Americans?

When we look at an image of a white person looking like a buffoon in an ad, we just think of a buffoon, but when we look at a black person or a Latino person or an Arab person looking like a buffoon, we look at the Arab buffoon or the black buffoon. We can’t distract our notions of racial identity. I wouldn’t say that there’s necessarily been a transfer. I think you still find a lot of images of black people. It’s just the way that African-Americans are featured in advertising, especially in visual culture, is much more thoughtful in the United States than it ever was. It’s because there’s a really strong political movement to make sure there are positive images of African-Americans, but there’s less so for other minorities who don’t have as much of a strong voice. It doesn’t really much bother us as African-Americans to see anyone else looking like a caricature, as long as it’s not us. My new work tries to recognize and reconcile that change in consciousness. As immigration policies have changed, you see a greater diversity of minorities in American culture. We talk about it as if it’s just black and white, but America is far from black and white.

EM: The Fair Warning series focuses on the language of cigarette ads of the past. How do you view these works—if at all—in relation to the Marlboro cowboy works by Richard Prince?

My Branded series is heavily inspired by Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Ellen Gallagher and Paul Pfeiffer. Just the idea of taking something and reframing it, looking at how that changes the meaning of the image, came almost directly from Richard Prince. With the Fair Warning series, I never actually thought about him, more so because I think a lot of my work has didactic or political messages latent in it, whether I like it or not. I couldn’t necessarily read anything particularly political in Richard Prince’s images.

EM: Your work has been frequently exhibited in the Bay Area, particularly Oakland. Do you live and work in the city?

I have a studio in New York and one in San Francisco, but I collaborate with a group called the Cause Collective. Most of the work we do is public art. We’re doing one piece for the Oakland Museum and another one for this gallery called SF Camerawork, but most of my personal career is in New York.

EM: Are you familiar with the Oakland art scene at all?

It actually kind of shifts a lot. The main people in Oakland never really go anywhere, but there’s also this big racial divide.

EM: I read about that divide in the East Bay Express. The article was reporting on how the burgeoning art community has been excluding the community of black artists that has been in Oakland for years before gentrification of the city. Is the divide as big as the article makes it out to be?

I think the artists they’re speaking about are the artists that didn’t go through grad school and higher education, local artists who’ve been working within the community for 20 or 30 years and have seen this wave of college and grad school art take over their community. I do know people in both communities, and it really never occurred to me until you brought it up that there’s no real overlap. But Oakland is weird that way. To be an artist in the Bay Area, if you were an artist that went through the grad school system, you really have an advantage, because there’s probably ten black people a year of all the schools in the area that graduate, so it’s really easy to stick out from any of your peers. It’s sad that a lot of the wonderful artists that I know who didn’t go through that system don’t have that same exposure. But they have a strong following in their own communities.

EM: Do you think there’s any tension between the way that your artwork critiques powerful institutions while working within them?

No, I don’t think there’s much tension, because my work is still limited. I made a choice with my work that—I wanted to make work that was focused on a system as a way to perceive it—not to tear down the system but to ask questions and arouse certain ideas. I’ve often made work that’s apparently counter-culture or graffiti in nature. Although it has a necessary presence, it’s easily written off by people in power. I want you to have to have a lawyer to take down my work. I see myself as building a name and reputation that’s harder to refute. It’s weird. I don’t think there’s a conflict that way, but for myself, it’s weird to not only make work about the exploitation of black culture but to also sell it. Any artist, once you sell any of your work, I would call it a sell-out. It’s selling a part of your soul or part of your ideas. When you put a price tag on art—I don’t think it diminishes the value of it—but I think it complicates the meaning of it. But since my work is very much about American culture, it should have commercial value. One of my shows was sponsored by Puma last year—one of the Puma images I appropriated they liked so much that they hired me and another artist to do an ad campaign for the show, which is really ironic. I always said that my work would truly be worth it when I’d be hired by the corporations I was critiquing. That’s what happens. When you look at legacies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, who were really scary people of their time—all these people who are part of a counter-culture are eventually absorbed into the system and somewhat diluted. I feel like it’s inevitable as long as our culture is as commerce- and media-driven as it is. That’s just a part of it.

Behind and in front of and next to these works are other people who are just as influential and powerful. But they either came before the media curb or a little bit after or didn’t look the part. We want to believe that if we stick to our guns, so to speak, and always do it how we want to do it, that’s somehow much more noble, but it depends on whether you want to get your message across. How do you do it? The people who successfully get their message across use the tools in front of them, which are popularity and media.

EM: How’s work on your new project, Myth of a Black History, coming along?

I’ve done a little bit but nothing really profound. As you have more opportunites for exposure to your work, the pressure to make new work becomes greater. With a lot of the work that people got to know me for—nobody cared, so there was no pressure. Whereas now that I know people might be looking at what I do and actually care, I have to think that much harder about my work, so the project will probably take much longer. I want to be much more thoughtful. With Black History, I have to really understand what I’m trying to say. I’m applying to residencies at different institutions that have big archives of black Americana. I have a show up right now, at the Wadsworth Atheneum, called Digging Deeper, with an artist named Willie Cole. Some of the work from that show will fit into that question of black history.

EM: How do you approach the research process for your work?

Very organically. Just talking to people, thumbing through magazines and books. Reading and looking at stuff online and trying to draw connections.

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http://hankwillisthomas.com/