HANK WILLIS THOMAS, winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November, 2008), received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

His work was featured in the exhibition and accompanying catalog, 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, New York; Artists Space, New York; and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. among others.

To find out more, visit Hank’s website.

The original image was by Charlie White. This image is part of a bigger series called Unbranded. Below is Thomas’s description of the project.

UNBRANDED is a series of images taken from magazine advertisements targeting a black audience or featuring black subjects, which I digitally manipulated and appropriated. In this work-in-progress project that will ultimately span from 1969 through the present, I have removed all aspects of the advertising information, e.g., text, logos, in order to reveal what’ being sold. Nothing more has been altered. I believe that in part, advertising’s success rests on its ability to reinforce generalizations around race, gender and ethnicity which can be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying, but which at a core level are a reflection of the way a culture views itself or its aspirations. By “unbranding” advertisements I can literally expose what Roland Barthes refers to as “what-goes-without-saying” in ads, and hopefully encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper about the empire of signs that have become second nature to our experience of life in the modern world.

Christian Croft is an artist and programmer who works in New York. His project featured here, Yeas & Nays, was funded by a Net Art Commission from Turbulence.org and received a third prize in the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America Contest.

To find out more, visit the Yeays and Nays project website. His “Yeas & Nays” project is a browser plug-in that helps you call congress from any webpage.

Yeas and Nays transforms any webpage into a way to contact Congressional representatives. Using Yeas and Nays, you can call your representative from any webpage, record your call and embed that recording on the page you were just reading. Other people who visit that webpage can then listen to your phone call.

Yeas and Nays works by adding a new function to a user’s web browser. Technically, it’s a plug-in that gets installed as an extension to the Firefox web browser. Once the plug-in is installed, a user can launch an application that works a lot like the Obama campaign’s online phone bank. You enter your zip code and phone number, and you choose whom to call among your two senators and one representative. The app then calls your phone and connects you to the office you specified. Right after finishing your conversation, an mp3 recording of your call appears on the webpage from which you launched the Yeas and Nays app. (If you’re shy, don’t worry. Yeas and Nays also provides the option to make a call without recording it.)

Yeas and Nays focuses on the moment where the power of information can manifest into action: that fertile moment when citizens discover information online about issues that affect them. By being accessible from any webpage, the app provides a tool that will bridge citizens to their representatives when they are most likely to deliver informed arguments.

Yeas and Nays is built using ShiftSpace, a plug-in that allows you to annotate webpages in a number of innovative ways. Installing Yeas and Nays may take several minutes, but once you succeed in doing so, you will be able to make free calls to Congress and to share your calls among your network. Instructions for installing and using Yeas and Nays can be found at the ShiftSpace website.