I Am That I Am

In order to mail a letter in this nation, you must include a 44-cent stamp. In this issue of the Fo(u)r 4, I present “I Am Amen” by Hank Willis Thomas as a book of twenty “stamps.” Just as the United States Postal Service produces stamps with images to commemorate historical figures, events, and national symbols, each text panel “stamp” of this installation represents many images of our collective history.

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I AM AMEN

HANK WILLIS THOMAS

Baltimore Museum of Art, 2009

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ARTIST. STATEMENT.

This suite of twenty works on canvas, inspired by a photograph of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike taken by the late Ernest C. Withers, features riffs on the famous I AM A MAN placards carried by the men on strike.    - Jack Shainman Gallery

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the MFA programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.  His work has been featured in many publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000) 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003), 30 Americans (RFC, 2008).  Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008.  He received a new media fellowship through the Tribeca Film Institute and was an artist in residence at John Hopkins University. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad including Galerie Anne De Villepoix in Paris, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. His collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include Dress Codes: The International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video, Greater New York at P.S. 1/MoMa, Contact Toronto Photography Festival and Houston Fotofest. Thomas is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.    http://HankWillisThomas.com

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I Am That I Am by M. Liz Andrews, Hank Willis Thomas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.LetterToObama.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.LetterToObama.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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