Charles Guice Contemporary presents Hank Willis Thomas' Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008. The 82-piece tour de force debuts in its entirety in After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. After 1968, which opens June 7, examines the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, while exploring the continuing relevance of progressive social change.
In Unbranded, Thomas appropriates print advertisements that feature or target African American audiences, stripping the original texts and logos to reveal what's really being sold. The viewer is left to reflect on how advertising plays an integral roll in constructing, reinforcing, and exploiting stereotypes about African American life--and how the public has become complicit in accepting them.
By presenting these works--two images for each of the forty years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King--Thomas reveals the visual language employed by advertisers, and the cultural biases in which they are rooted. With King's death, 1968 became the symbolic end of the Civil Rights Movement; Unbranded attempts to explore the evolution of African Americans in the "corporate eye" from that time until now.
For Thomas, the significance of these ads is two-fold:
"I am not only interested in how other people see us, but also how we see ourselves-- what we can learn about our own assumptions, as well as how we were are "othered". By "unbranding" advertisements I can expose what Roland Barthes refers to as 'what-goes-without-saying' in ads, and encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper about the 'empire of signs' that have become second nature to our experience of life in a commodified world."
A few select pieces by Hank Willis Thomas will be featured in Double Exposure, the upcoming exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.
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