If Hank Willis Thomas is a familiar name for you, perhaps you remember him from our 2011 exhibition 30 Americans, which featured a roster of amazing African American contemporary artists. Thomas is a photographer whose primary interest involves linking race or racially charged images with advertising and popular culture. His correlations lead us, as viewers, to consider the present, as well as the past, in a new and sometimes shocking light. “Ultimately, my goal is to subvert the common perception of ‘black history’ as somehow separate from American history,” Thomas has said.

The Cotton Bowl presents a mirrored representation of a football player and a cotton picker—here, a post-slavery sharecropper. Nearly identical in pose and gaze, both men display the physical prowess necessary to perform their duties in agriculture and sports stardom. Yet as they are aligned, they face one other across their own invisible line of scrimmage, becoming tangible symbols of the struggle between current events and historical situations that some African Americans feel. Thomas often comments on African Americans in sports and the glory they can receive there, and the staggering economic differences between sports stars and their nonathlete peers.

What questions does The Cotton Bowl inspire about the economic positions of these characters? Is the football player in a better position than his sharecropping ancestor? And how does the play on words in the title—referring both to the classic college football bowl game and the protective covering for raw cotton before it is harvested—tie this image together?

Thomas creates images that are simultaneously accessible and symbolically loaded—and this one will bring lots of conversation and discussion to our galleries when it becomes part of the permanent collection. This is the first work by Thomas that the NCMA has acquired, and the Museum community thanks our Contemporaries for a great choice.

Image: Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011, digital chromogenic print, 65 × 96 in., © 2012 Hank Willis Thomas

―Jennifer Dasal is associate curator of contemporary art at the NCMA.

The Museum’s newest acquisition of contemporary art is now on view in the Portrait Gallery of West Building. Amid the 18^th- and 19^th-century portraits of earls, cardinals, and kings, you will find Kehinde Wiley’s larger-than-life portrait of a contemporary woman, Judith and Holofernes, 2012.

Known for his monumental portraits of young black men, placed in historical poses and settings appropriated from Old Master paintings, Wiley critiques the racism of art history while also commenting on contemporary street culture and masculine identity. Reinventing classical portraiture and questioning who is represented in the portraits found in museums worldwide, Wiley states, “The whole conversation of my work has to do with power and who has it.”

Judith and Holofernes is from Wiley’s most recent body of work and his first series of paintings to feature female subjects. Wiley uses “street casting” to find his models—walking city streets and asking ordinary people if they would pose for a portrait. He met the model for this painting, Treisha Lowe, at Fulton Mall, a pedestrian shopping street in downtown Brooklyn. This painting references a specific art-historical work, a 17th-century painting by Giovanni Baglione, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1608. The subject is taken from the apocryphal Old Testament Book of Judith, in which a Jewish town is under attack by the Assyrian army led by the general Holofernes. Judith, a widow from the town, goes to Holofernes under the pretense of helping him defeat the Jews. After he falls asleep, she cuts his head off with his own sword, and the town defeats the army. Wiley translates this image of a courageous, powerful woman into a contemporary version that resonates with fury and righteousness.

Wiley takes obvious artistic license with the story—Holofernes is represented by a woman’s head, and Judith wears a gown designed by Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy. This new rendition can be interpreted on many different levels, including racial and gender identity and inequity, the representation of women throughout art history, and society’s ideals for beauty. In Wiley’s words, “I am painting women in order to come to terms with the depictions of gender within the context of art history. One has to broaden the conversation . . . This series of works attempts to reconcile the presence of black female stereotypes that surrounds their presence and/or absence in art history, and the notions of beauty, spectacle, and the ‘grand’ in painting.”

Linda Johnson Dougherty is the NCMA’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art.

Image: Kehinde Wiley, Judith and Holofernes, 2012, oil on linen, 120 x 90 in., Purchased with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Hanes in honor of Dr. Emily Farnham, by exchange, and from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), by exchange

In this work Thomas has re-created the traditional image of the Three Graces, usually presented in art-historical iconography as three women, representing conventional values of charm, beauty, and creativity. Here the Graces are updated as modern African American women, dressed up and ready for a night out on the town.

Mickalene Thomas (artist site, @mickalenethomas)
American, born 1971
Three Graces: Les Trois Femmes Noires
2011
Rhinestone, acrylic paint, and oil enamel on wood panel
Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), 2011 (2011.10)