Probing the intersection of identity, race, class, media, and popular culture, Hank Willis Thomas appropriates images from historical advertisements in order to highlight the ways they construct identity and power. “In recent years, I have approached my art practice assuming the role of a visual culture archaeologist,” says the artist. “I am interested in the ways that popular imagery informs how people perceive themselves and others around the world.”

It's The Real Thing! is part of Thomas’s photographic series “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968–2008” (2008), which features imagery from print advertisements directed toward African American audiences over the past fifty years. The artist manipulates and erases brand logos and marketing texts from these images to examine their meanings. For It’s The Real Thing! Thomas uses the image of a vintage Coca-Cola advertisement that features a group of adolescent boys and girls and an older woman gathered on a stairway leading up to an apartment building, each holding in their hands the iconic glass bottles (with logos erased). Stripping the products of their brand, Thomas reveals a convivial moment among young men and women on a stoop. Through this series, Thomas intends to show “that advertising is never really about the product. It’s about what myths or generalizations you can get people to buy into . . . I removed all the advertising information as a way to track blackness in the corporate eye, from the moment that ‘black’ people became a demographic that was worth marketing to.” 

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2017); California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2016); International Center of Photography, New York (2013); Baltimore Museum of Art (2009); and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (2008). His work has been included in important group exhibitions at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2016); Brooklyn Museum (2016); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2015); International Center of Photography, New York (2013), and many others. His work is held in numerous institutional and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.