Fair Warning. Hank Willis Thomas introduced by his gallerist Katie Rashid

by Fantom

As featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010

In Unbranded, Hank Willis Thomas’s largest and best known series to date, the artist selected two advertisements each year from 1968 to 2008, removing all logos and text in order to uncover what was really being sold: the representation of African-Americans, for consumption by the constituent public. A central concern in his work is how this representation, replete with prejudices and stereotypes, has evolved (or remained consistent) over that forty-year span.

 

While working on his latest series, Unbranded, Thomas noticed the high incidence of cigarette ads in publications geared towards African-Americans, such as Ebony and Jet. These ads became the basis for his current body of work, Fair Warning. Focusing on ads featuring African-American women in particular, Thomas once again removed logos, text, and the product in question (there is not a cigarette to be found) from the original advertisements. Thomas further obscured the context by removing nearly everything other than the black female models. In some instances, Thomas remained true to the original ad and a female and a male model appear together; in other instances he features a single woman; and in still others he created groups of three or more women from different ads and arranged them on a flat white background according to their physical posture or type of attire, from formal dress to casual sportswear. Stylish, free-spirited, confident women strike a myriad of poses. Their nonchalant hand gestures, sans cigarettes, appear almost natural, as if the women are using a feminist sign language to communicate the key to their implied shared success and fabulousness.

 

 

“We don’t smoke that s***. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and stupid.”
David Goerlitz, former model for Winston cigarette ads, quoting an R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Executive

Thomas occasionally juxtaposes these images with snippets of original ad copy: “Believe It,” “Definitely,” and “It Shows.” In one image/text combination, an elegant woman in a beige jumpsuit tilts her head back in knowing laughter. The only remaining ad copy is the ominous and ubiquitous warning from the Surgeon General, which lists numerous ailments linked to smoking, including one of particularly feminine concern (“may complicate pregnancy.”)

 

By repurposing images and text and reconfiguring them in stark compositions, Thomas uses the strategies of mass media, advertisers, and producers of popular culture, exposing the inane language and the rote repetition of a romanticized body in space. Whereas Unbranded focused on the illustration and perpetuation of stereotypes surrounding blackness, emphasizing caricatures of African Americans, their purported athleticism, sexual prowess, and culinary preferences, as well as their socioeconomic subjugation throughout American history, Fair Warning operates on a subtler and more sinister level (in no small part because of the products they promote.)Thomas’s reductive tactics uncover the absurdity of the ad makers’ empty emphasis on fashion and the body, and the resultant images, while compelling, seem almost entirely devoid of meaning. The only thing left for consumption is the lithe black female body.