Zero Hour from the Wayfarer series (Primary Title)
Hank Willis Thomas, American, born 1976 (Artist)
Sanford Biggers, American, born 1970 (Artist)
I’ve always felt more comfortable in the gray space. I think it’s closer to the truth of any given scenario. —Hank Willis Thomas Thomas often appropriates mass-media images and texts, which he manipulates to explore tacit assumptions and attitudes about black identity. Zero Hour presents fellow artist Sanford Biggers dressed in the guise of a 19th-century minstrel, whose image Thomas found in Emory University’s photographic holdings documenting African American life. The right side of Biggers’s face and body are white, while his left side is black, creating a striking emblem of racial hybridity. A film of Lumisty applied to the glazing causes the images to come in and out of focus as one changes position—another visual analogy for the blurry lines of race itself.
Pamela K. and William A. Royall Jr. Fund for 21st Century Art and the National Endowment for the Arts Fund for American
Art
Identity Shifts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, April 26 – July 27, 2014
© Hank Willis Thomas
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