Negroes To Be Sold

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Hank Willis Thomas

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• 2009

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• Relief Print;Offset Lithograph

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• Image/sheet: 24 x 17″

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• 30 prints in this edition

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About the Print

nHank Willis Thomas is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Negroes to Be Sold appropriates and riffs on the form and appearance of 18th-century advertisements for the sale of slaves, inserting familiar silhouettes of contemporary sports and entertainment figures and of the now iconic figures used to represent enslaved bodies. Realized as a laser-cut relief print, Thomas has captured the style and tactile quality of 18th-century prints with raised lettering that renders the printing surface as a sculptural relief. The original auction advertisement appropriated by the artist was published in Charleston, SC, on April 26, 1760.n_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}nnn

Hank Willis Thomas

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AmericannBorn March 17, 1976 in Plainfield, NJ

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About the Artist

nHank Willis Thomas is a photographer, sculptor, and conceptual artist born in Plainfield, NJ. He earned his BFA in photography and Africana studies from New York University and an MA in visual criticism and an MFA in photography from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He holds honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Brooklyn Museum, New York City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, among many others. In 2016 he founded For Freedoms, New York City, a nationwide arts initiative that has produced exhibitions, town-hall meetings, billboards, and public art to spur greater participation in civic life. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ collection features one of his works titled All Power to All People (2016).n_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}