Join us for a Juneteenth Celebration featuring Hank Willis Thomas.

“Ebony and Jet created the greatest archive of the African American experience…” ---Hank Willis Thomas

Visions of Black Life: Honoring the Johnson Publishing Company reimagines the Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Using the Johnson Publishing Company digital archive, Hank Willis Thomas will address the making and uses of photographic archives, the narratives they tell, and the parameters that define them as objects of study.

This artist talk will explore the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the field of Black visual studies and to familiarize them with the work of activists, scholars and artists working in this area. The practice of Black visual studies entails the critical evaluation of historical images in multiple realms of culture: migration, art, new media, activism, medical humanities, and politics. The construction of beauty and style, gendered images, identity, race, and Black women activists as icons in music and popular culture will also be considered. 

Participants will investigate formal and conceptual components of images, as well as issues of image-reception and agency. The interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-presentation and imposed representation as well as in ads / advertising --all are fundamental to our discussion of the visual construction of Black people within a global landscape. 

This program is made possible with support from Getty through its "Visions of Black Life: Honoring the Johnson Publishing Company" initiative.  

Photo credit: Jai Lennard