Liberty

New York-based artist Hank Willis Thomas explores how identity and ideas of race are shaped by the media and popular culture. Through photography, sculpture, film, installations and public art works, Thomas appropriates recognizable imagery to critique how advertisements brand us. He works through popular clichés to expose the ways they shape how we see ourselves and each other.

Sculpture Milwaukee presents Liberty, 2015, originally presented in New York by the Public Art Fund, which described Liberty as “…a life-size, candy-coated bronze sculpture derived from a 1986 found photograph of a Harlem Globetrotter. He spins a basketball on his finger, in the likeness of the Statue of Liberty, which is featured in the background of the image. In a digital era where electronic devices mediate our viewing experiences, the three-dimensional arm, appropriated from the photograph, invites the viewer to consider the framing and context of the images that surround us.”
Thomas was born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from NYU in 1998, and his MFA in Photography and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2004.