A Rare Spotlight on Black Women s Art Still Shines After 51 Years nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
IN A SMALL GALLERY on the second floor of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum hangs Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. A young boy sits in the lap of his grandfather, learning to play the titular instrument, the pair surrounded by the evidence of life lived: clothes hung in the background, a loaf of bread and a white pitcher on a table, cooking pots at their feet. Color and shadow blend exquisitely to create a subtle glow that is cast onto the pair together at the fireside.Tanner is widely regarded as the most important Black American artist of the nineteenth century, and this 1893 oil
ISBN: 9781597114486
Contributors
Photographs by Hank Willis Thomas. Text by Julia Dolan, Sara Krajewski, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. Interviewer Kellie Jones. By Bobby Martin.
Hank Willis Thomas (born in Plainfield, New Jersey, 1976) received his BFA from New York University, and an MFA in photography and an MA in visual criticism from California College of the Arts. His first monograph,
Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. His collaborative projects include the book and traveling exhibition
Question Bridge: Black Males, the installation
In Search of the Truth, and For Freedoms, the first artist-run super PAC, founded in 2016. In 2017, Thomas received the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.