Artist Hank Willis Thomas celebrated a great week last week, starting off with his work being on the cover of New York Magazine, which featured his illustration of Barack Obama and getting to look at advance copies of his first monograph, Pitch Blackness, which will be released by Aperture in October 2008. Hank Willis Thomas was selected as the winner of the first Aperture West Book Prize, an Aperture initiative announced in January 2007 to raise awareness of Western-based photographers in the United States. The artist has gained wide recognition with his highly provocative series B®ANDED, which addresses the commodification of African-American male identity by raising questions about visual culture and the power of logos. The monograph is a virtual tour-de-force which visually deals with the senseless murder of the artist’s young cousin Songha Willis, the issues of grief, black-on-black violence in America and the ways in which corporate culture is complicit in the crises of black male identity and culminating in his latest series Unbranded- in which Willis Thomas examines advertising and media representation of African-Americans. Hank Willis Thomas is one of the most compelling emerging artists of today and we are pleased to let our devoted blog readers know that we will be introducing a print by Hank in our limited-edition photographs program. Stay tuned! For additional information on the artist you can view his website.

Tags: Aperture West Book Prize, Hank Willis Thomas, Limited-Edition Photograph, New York Magazine, Pitch Blackness

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Awards & Prizes, Books, Limited-Edition Photographs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.