Hank Willis Thomas press

Posted on | July 2, 2009 | No Comments

Hank Willis Thomas

Images change (or do they?) in time

Los Angeles Times
Leah Ollman
June 26,
2009, page D19

Stepping into the project room at Roberts & Tilton is like entering a time capsule. The walls are papered from floor to ceiling with reproductions of Jet magazine’s “Beauty of the Week” feature, dating from the early 1950s nearly to the present. The installation by Hank Willis Thomas wraps around you almost entirely, with one strip of wall space left blank like an ellipsis: to be continued ….

Thomas typically uses the idioms of advertising and popular culture in his work, and “Black Is Beautiful” is no exception. Jet’s long-running feature pairing swimsuit portraits and brief bios promotes a certain ideal of beauty that, presumably, has changed with the times and the magazine’s editorial stance.

Externals mark some shifts: color printing replaces black-and-white about one-third of the way through the chronological span (the pages aren’t dated); the language of the captions evolves (”black” replaces “Negro,” and so on); bathing suits become skimpier over time; naturals are seen alongside processed hairstyles; bust-waist-hip measurements are eventually dropped from the texts.

Career choices described in the mini-profiles broaden from the feminine stereotypes of two generations ago (nurse, secretary, teacher) to include such unisex professions as banker and Coast Guard officer, but still, aspiring models prevail. After all, this is a page about appearance, not accomplishment.

Thomas doesn’t interpret this array of evidence but instead leaves it to us to determine whether the spectrum of styles and choices represented feels wide or narrow, whether significant social changes (whither the civil rights struggle? the antiwar movement? feminism?) register among these consistently smiling faces, or how the mainstream African American ideal of beauty intersects with the mainstream white ideal. With “Black Is Beautiful,” Thomas provides the means for both celebration and critique and then backs off, prompting us to determine what proportions to assign to each.

Black is Beautiful: Hank Willis Thomas

Art in America

Michelle Carlson

June 30, 2009

In the wildly popular television drama about advertising executives in 1960’s Manhattan, Mad Men, the main character Donald Draper tells one of his mistresses, “the love you want was created by guys like me … to sell nylons.”  Images in mainstream media have long been driven and mediated by political, social and economic motivations.  Notions of race and beauty, like the false love Draper struggles with, have also been influenced and molded by images that inundate the visual landscape. In her essay, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” Coco Fusco reminds us that not only does the visualization of race have political power but that there is also a mainstream, multimillion-dollar entertainment industry that has continuous economic interests in the visual representation of race.  The stakes are high: Images do not just record race and beauty; they have a hand in its production, too. In “Black is Beautiful”, his current show at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles (June 13, 2009-August 1, 2009), Hank Willis Thomas considers beauty as a politicized act by surveying the prevalence of African American pin-up models in the media.

From a distance the installation feels like a large-scale map, charting the topography of an unknown and barely recognizable landscape. Yet, upon entering the gallery’s project room, one is overwhelmed by the 3,000 pictures that wallpaper the space, mapping an entirely different sort of landscape. Thomas has chronicled the shifts in beauty (and by default, desire) of the representation of raced female bodies, spanning half a century. There is a feeling of time passing — decades left behind, changes in technology and desire bleed into one another as the photographs shift from black and white into color.

Yet, what is compelling about Thomas’s installation is how the visual tropes of desire, beauty, and race so often stay the same.  Once the changing styles, hairdos and fashions of the times have been stripped away, what is left?  This excavation of thousands of images feels ominously repetitious as the female body is arranged in certain positions and within particular contexts that has varied little over half a century; a span of time that has included the Civil Rights era, women’s liberation, multiculturalism to now, a moment where powerful and influential women such as Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey are household names. And yet, the desire to see beauty defined through sexualized representations of women of color still holds its ground.

Concurrently “Black is Beautiful,” suggests a level of empowerment in the ability to re-appropriate what might otherwise be seen as objectified images of the black female body.  This line is precarious, however, and often fraught. The force of the collection of images not only questions the lineage of using the raced body in media but also asks about what meaning is produced when the representations of beauty are not as diverse as the groups that it claims to represent-the troubling idea of difference within the context of sameness.

The contemporary visual landscape is a contested site in which more illusory, yet popular anxieties about race, gender and sexuality often manifest.  ”Black is Beautiful” asks viewers to begin questioning their own role in this cyclical relationship in dynamic exchanges that allow them to re-appropriate, challenge, or reject these conventions.  Although there may be political agendas to advance and advertising accounts to land, the viewer and the everyday consumer hold a greater stake in this transaction. And if beauty is a politicized act, then Thomas succinctly reminds us that passive participation is still participation, regardless of the intention.

Hank Willis Thomas Black is Beautiful is on view at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California, until August 1, 2009.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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