06/12/2025
JUNETEENTH AT THE BLOCKSON COLLECTION
Hank Willis Thomas | Visions of Black Life: Honoring the Johnson Publishing Company
Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Center for Anti-Racism, 140 Mazur Hall, 1114 W. Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122
Registration: https://charlesstudy.temple.edu/event/14770124
“Ebony and Jet created the greatest archive of the African American experience…”
---Hank Willis Thomas
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. As visual collections, photographic archives present specific concerns, especially as digital technologies change the way knowledge is classified, stored, retrieved, and disseminated.
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.
