Hank Willis Thomas at Kadist: Blunt and ingenious

Race is not merely a difficult topic, one of the last taboos at the dinner tables of polite society.

The work appropriates the graphic symbol of the South African neo-Nazi party Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, progressively turning it from a Germanic, implicative black-on-white-on-red emblem to a flashing, swirling kaleidoscope of changing hues.

A soundtrack of black South African music and sound, from Miriam Makeba’s famously joyous dance “Pata Pata” to freedom themes and speeches, drives the imagery.

For “Two Little Prisoners” (2014), the artist simply lifted a newsmagazine image of a police officer with two young boys, one holding a card that suggests a crime-booking photograph.

By printing the image in outline on a mirror, he forces the viewer to become part of the picture, and thereby implicated in the event.

Look closer, and the design resolves into text — the first words of the Constitution; closer still, and it reveals itself as a quilt made from striped, variously soiled, decommissioned prison uniforms.

[...] the visual strength and ingenuity of most of the objects carry them out of the realm of the cliche and into the tradition of the best political and protest art.

Political art — whether in graphics or song or theater — often depends on the retelling of collectively remembered stories and the reinforcement of strongly held beliefs.

A five-channel video work from 2014, “A Person Is More Important Than Anything Else,” is partly an extraordinarily touching, 28-minute documentary on James Baldwin, but it also veers close to visual sloganeering, as intercut images from old movies and snippets of advertising underline the author’s recorded statements.

Only if we use a camera flash to (re-)photograph the framed object before us is the famous image revealed: a flag on its pole being used to attack an African American man in a three-piece suit.

At what age, then, was the image branded on his mind, as it was instantly seared into the consciousness, surely, of countless Americans of color, as our nation blithely celebrated its bicentennial?

A film series curated by Hank Willis Thomas will be presented at the Roxie Theater and at Kadist Art Foundation throughout the period of the exhibition; information is available at the Kadist website.