Hank Willis Thomas: Strange Fruit

Over the past decade, Thomas has created a body of work that provocatively explores the way popular and consumer culture represents African-American identity and history. Taking its title from the song about lynching popularized by Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit brings together four large-scale photographs and a video work whose subject is the way sports, specifically basketball and football, connect present-day black experience to a continuum of racism in America. Thomas's framing and recontextualization of familiar sports activities reveals the pervasive underlying structures that help define both black male identity and the systems governing the broader athletic culture in the United States.