Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist’s prolific and extraordinary interdisciplinary career, with a particular focus on the work’s relationship to the photographic image and to issues of representation and perception. At the core of Hank Willis Thomas’s practice, is his ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprises American culture, and to do so with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity. Other powerful themes include the commodification of identity through popular media, sports, and advertising. In the ten years since his first publication, Pitch Blackness , Thomas has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art, equally at home with collaborative, trans-media projects such as Question Bridge, Philly Block, and For Freedoms as he is with high-profile, international solo exhibitions. This extensive presentation of his work contextualizes the material with incisive essays from Portland Art Museum curators Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski and art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and an in-depth interview between Dr. Kellie Jones and the artist that elaborates on Thomas’s influences and inspirations.

Hank Willis Thomas (born in Plainfield, New Jersey, 1976) received his BFA from New York University, and an MFA in photography and an MA in visual criticism from California College of the Arts. His first monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. His collaborative projects include the book and traveling exhibition Question Bridge: Black Males, the installation In Search of the Truth, and For Freedoms, the first artist-run super PAC, founded in 2016. In 2017, Thomas received the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in South Africa. Julia Dolan, PhD, is the Minor White Curator of Photography at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. She has worked with the photography collections at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Sara Krajewski is the Robert and Mercedes Eicholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon. She is the recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for research into emerging transdisciplinary artistic practices. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2015), and served as guest editor for "Vision & Justice," an issue of Aperture magazine, for which she received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (2015), and served as guest editor for "Vision & Justice," an issue of Aperture magazine, for which she received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Kellie Jones is Professor in the department of art history and archaeology and a Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016.