ANOTHER SPACE

Álvaro Barrios (Colombia, b. 1945)

Multidisciplinary artist Álvaro Barrios often engages with themes related to pop culture, surrealism, and conceptual art. Known primarily for his ironic and humorous prints, Barrios is influenced mainly by Duchamp’s readymades and iconoclastic approach to high art. In works such as Álvaro Barrios as Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (1980-2007), Barrios appropriates Duchamp’s iconic self-portrait depicting himself as his female alter ego, Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (1920). Performing for the camera as Duchamp’s alter ego, Barrios challenges gender norms while simultaneously reshaping Rrose Sélavy’s femininity on his terms by including a mustache.

 

Hernan Bas (USA, b. 1978)

Miami-born artist Hernan Bas is best known for his highly detailed figurative paintings that reimagine the western art historical canon through a homoerotic lens. Through the thick, expressionistic application of paint and use of richly saturated colors, Bas crafts intimate genre scenes and lush, romantic landscapes through which androgynous male figures explore the world, themselves, and one another. Bas has stated that his subjects occupy “fag limbo” – implicitly erotic, almost atemporal spaces through which men can explore the boundaries between public and private, youth and adulthood, and innocence and experience that shape gay identity. Bas’s Sip In (2019) references a photograph of a historically significant event within the history of gay US activism: the 1966 sip-in at the bar Julius. Inspired by the sit-ins of the civil rights movement, three men staged a ‘sip-in’ at Julius (now considered the oldest gay bar in New York) after being denied service for being openly gay. Bas’s composition recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495-98). In drawing comparisons between the gay activists and Christ on the eve of his death, Bas highlights the ongoing precarity of the gay community that remains a target of violence.

 

Alfredo Boulton (Venezuela, b. 1908 – d. 1995)

Art historian, critic, essayist, and photographer Alfredo Boulton is considered one of the most influential intellectual figures in twentieth-century Venezuela. His interest in photography began when, while studying in Europe in the 1920s, he encountered Man Ray’s experimental, Surrealist photographs. Returning to Venezuela in 1928, he became involved in the avant-garde movement and developed his own style, seeking to represent his country in pictures. Boulton’s subjects were wide-ranging, capturing Venezuelan landscapes, lifestyles, customs, and history. He was also recognized for his experimental studies of the human figure, wherein the body is decontextualized, fragmented, or presented through unusual perspectives. His research on and analysis of Venezuelan art, published in over 60 books, including the three-volume History of Painting in Venezuela (1964-72), helped shape the country’s historiography.

 

Valerie Brathwaite (Trinidad & Tobago, b. 1940)

Born in 1940 in Trinidad & Tobago, Valerie Brathwaite moved abroad to study art and interior design. Between 1959 and 1964, she studied in London at the Hornsey College of Arts and the Royal College of Art and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1969, Brathwaite relocated to Caracas, encouraged by the German-born Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt). The burgeoning Venezuelan art scene welcomed Braithwaite, and she soon became a valuable member of the contemporary art scene. Brathwaite’s practice includes printmaking, painting, and drawing, but she is best known for her sculptures. With works such as ST (1979-2009), Brathwaite employs abstract curvilinear shapes to suggest the Caribbean and Latin American flora, fauna, and topography painted in bright colors that remind one of those found in tropical nature. Contrasting these, the contours of natural forms such as mountains and sunsets, can be interpreted as suggestive of breasts and phallic forms. Valerie Braithwaite’s work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Fine Art, and The National Art Gallery, all in Caracas.

 

Maris Bustamante (Mexico, b. 1949)

Maris Bustamante is a multidisciplinary artist best known for her conceptual and performance art. Working under government repression, many artists in 1970s Mexico City formed collectives and experimented with conceptual approaches to artmaking, a moment known as los grupos (the groups) movement. During this period, Bustamante, alongside Rubén Valencia, Melquiades Herrera, and Alfredo Nuñez, formed No-grupo (No-group), a pun on the proliferation of artists’ collectives. Building upon Peruvian art critic Juan Acha’s writings on arte no-objetual, No-grupo often staged conceptual interventions in public space, appropriating and re-signifying everyday objects, actions, and language to destabilize traditional social structures and representational codes. As a member of No-grupo, Bustamante’s performances, at times absurdist, explored the overlapping issues of gender, power, and property, as in her contribution to the collective’s 1982 performance Caliente-Caliente (mano a mano con Carlos Zerpa), El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a Freud lo macho. Staged at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Bustamante engaged spectators by handing them cardboard masks of her face, her nose replaced by a phallus labeled as a “work instrument.” A commentary on the Freudian concept of phallic envy, Bustamante utilized humor and irony to question gender roles. After the dissolution of No-grupo, Bustamante formed the feminist collective Polvo de Gallina Negra (1983-1993) with Mónica Mayer.

 

María Fernanda Cardoso (Colombia, b. 1963)

Maria Fernanda Cardoso, born in Bogotá, Colombia 1963 and based in Sydney, Australia, explores the overlapping of nature, art, science, and technology to produce innovative installations. Her sculptures, performances, and videos invite the viewer to investigate the complexities of nature and sciences further. The 1994 installation and performance titled Cardoso Flea Circus (1994) featured live cat fleas. Cardoso trained fleas to perform acts such as pulling chariots, jumping through hoops, and dancing the tango. Following this installation, Cardoso grew an interest in insect genitalia after her work with fleas, which are thought to have unique reproductive organs. Conducting archival work at the Australian Museum of Natural History in Sydney, Cardoso searched for images and information on other insects’ genitalia, revealing the incredible complexity and diversity of insect sex organs. Motivated by this new knowledge, Cardoso endeavored to open the Cardoso Penis Museum, but, unable to secure funding due to the taboo nature of the project, she elected to pursue a Ph.D. in the arts and science of reproductive morphologies. The Ph.D. research allowed her to realize her most significant project to date, the Museum of Copulatory Organs (2012), which included Cardoso’s models of male and female insect genitalia. Her related project, It's not the Size that Matters, it is Shape (2011), offers a closer look at the reproductive organs of the Harvestmen spider, native to Southern Australia. Cardoso’s photos examine the unusually shaped reproductive organs of the Harvestmen spiders, complete with folds and spikes. By enlarging the images, Cardoso challenges the viewers to rethink society’s obsession with the phallus and reconsider what a phallus should resemble.

 

Feliciano Centurión (Paraguay, b. 1962 – d 1996)

Feliciano Centurión was born in 1962 in San Ignacio, Paraguay’s subtropical rainforest region. Centurión was brought up mainly by his mother and grandmother, who taught him the arts of embroidery and crochet. An openly gay man in an ultra-conservative Paraguayan society, then under the repressive military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, Centurión moved to Buenos Aires in 1980.  There, he began to produce works of blankets, pillows, aprons, and other intimate household wares embellished with delicate embroidery and crochet, frequently depicting mythical beings and the wildlife and lush vegetation of his native Paraguayan region. After being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, Centurión began incorporating references to his illness, sexuality, and imminent death. In Estoy Vivo (I Am Alive) (1994), produced two years before the artist’s untimely death at the age of 34, a green silk-satin fabric in the shape of a four-leaf clover is overlaid onto a plain wool blanket— like those used by hospital patients— which is inscribed with an optimistic message of life (I am alive). Estoy Vivo (I am Alive) symbolizes a simple and defiant act of personal survival while challenging the public’s attempt at silencing the AIDS epidemic.

 

Paz Errázuriz (Chile, b. 1944)

Paz Errázuriz’s photographs often portray the marginalized communities of Chilean society. Her best-known series, Adam’s Apple (1982-90), explores the everyday lives of transgender prostitutes persecuted because of their gender identity/expression and sexuality under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Exéresis (2004), Errázuriz’s only series made outside of Latin America, extends her interest in gender and representation. Named after the Greek word for “excision,” Errázuriz photographs classical male torsos, on display in major western museums, that are lacking genitalia. Rendered in black-and-white, Errázuriz’s torsos are captured in a liminal space, as if existing between genders. Exéresis points to the ruin of the phallic symbol, male castration anxiety, and the discourses of power surrounding the phallus.

 

Fernell Franco (Colombia, b. 1942 – d. 2006)

Born in Versalles, Colombia in 1942, Fernell Franco and his family moved to Cali in 1951, displaced from their home due to the Colombian civil war (1948-1958). Franco began working as a courier for a photography studio, where his interest in photography began. Eventually, when he turned 15, a local newspaper hired Franco as a photojournalist. Tasked with documenting Cali’s street life during a period of immense social, political, and cultural change, Franco became known for his ability to capture everyday life, photographing various social spaces like brothels, billiard halls, and Cali’s brightly painted cafes. In Serie Billares (1985), Franco offers an intimate glimpse into the billiard hall, an exclusively masculine space where men could socialize, play games, and drink. Though Franco would go on to work for major national newspapers and, later, as a fashion and advertising photographer, he remained dedicated to his photojournalistic work in Cali. Exploring the dramatic changes to the city’s industrial modernization Franco often employed formal tropes of Italian Neorealism and filme noire while experimenting with formatting. Franco’s photographs captured a city in flux.

 

Julio Galán (Mexico, b. 1958 – d. 2006)

Born in Múzquiz, Mexico in 1958 to a conservative Roman Catholic family, Julio Galán studied architecture before pursuing his interest in painting. Moving to New York in 1984, Galán became part of Andy Warhol’s circle. After Galán’s works were illustrated in Warhol’s Interview magazine, the artist became increasingly successful in the local and international art scene. Experimenting with collage, Galán often turned to self-portraiture as expressions of interchangeable references to male and female gender identities with religious overtones referencing Catholicism. In Untitled (2003), Galán represents himself naked, posed as a martyr with crossed arms, seemingly cloaked under a sheer white veil with milk tearing from his eyes and breasts. The collaged and painted elements reference the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of the Sorrows surrounded by white roses. Galan’s naked body is posed covering his sex with a white rose and collaged felt fig leaf, suggestive of Adam and Eve’s original sin and fall from grace as a result of defying God. Because of their original sin, the first man and woman were banished from the garden of Eden and, losing their innocence, became self-conscious of their nakedness. With texts written across the painting in either Spanish and English, Galan reinforced ideas of shameful abandonment writing “Mama me duele tanto que me dejaras (Mother, it hurts me so that you have left me),” and warning of deceitful hypocrisy with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “May Smile, and smile and be a Villain.” The artist broke with gendered rules of male self-representation, exploring the everyday tensions experienced by gay people facing rigid gender norms, shunned by family, religion and society.

 

Félix González-Torres (Cuba, b. 1957 – d. 1996)

Félix González-Torres was born in Guáimaro, Cuba in 1957. Sent with his sister to live with relatives in Puerto Rico in 1971, González-Torres studied art at the University of Puerto Rico art. He moved to New York City in 1979, where he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and received a BFA in photography from the Pratt Institute of Art. González-Torres’s artistic practice overlapped with his involvement in social, political, and cultural activism. From 1987-1991, he was a member of the conceptual art collective Group Material, which, in response to the culture wars of the 1980s, sought to bring attention to issues such as US foreign policy and the AIDs epidemic (the latter a focus of González-Torres’s practice). An openly gay man, González-Torres is perhaps best known for his works that explored the themes of gender, sexuality, sickness, love, and loss during the peak of the AIDS crisis and the government’s efforts to ignore the epidemic’s impact on the gay community. González-Torres’s works often responded to the illness and eventual death of his partner, Ross Laycock, in 1991. Untitled (Lover’s Letter) (1991) presents pieces of a letter by González-Torres to Ross in the form of a jigsaw puzzle, deconstructing the social, emotional, and interpersonal fragmentation inflicted by the epidemic. González-Torres died of AIDS-related complications in 1996.

 

Nicolas Guagnini (Argentina,b.1966)

Nicolas Guagnini is an Argentine-born writer and artist based in New York. Guagnini’s sculptures often explore questions related to the performance of masculinity, as in works such as Hermaphrodite Drawings (2016) and The Bewitched Man (2016). The works consist of glazed vitrified ceramics depicting oversized sensory organs, including phalluses, ears, nose, and feet, amassed into a tumultuous pile. Placing the ceramic accumulations on top of found books, Guagnini has dismembered his body into fragments as a form of self-portraiture. In The Bewitched Man, the porcelain sculpture is seemingly stepping on the book dedicated to the famous Spanish painter, I, Goya. An ironic reference to the artist as male genius, in Hermaphrodite Drawings Guagnini similarly positions the ceramic accumulation over a book, Mike Kelley: Hermaphrodite Drawings. In both works, Guagnini challenges notions of virility and phallocentrism in society and the art world.

 

Lyle Ashton Harris (USA, b. 1965)

Born in the Bronx in 1965 and raised between Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Lyle Ashton Harris investigates themes of gender and identity politics through photography, collage, installations, and performance. Working across diverse mediums, Harris challenges preconceived notions of gender and race, often relying on himself as the subject. For Billie, Boxers, and Better Days (2002), Harris created a series of performative self-portraits, symbolizing iconic Black performers and types from the earlier twentieth century, such as the boxer, Billie Holiday, and Josephine Baker, to explore the relationship between the Black iconicity, violence, and modernism’s “negrophilia.” Harris revisits these themes in Five Photogravures (2004). Performing once again as the bloodied boxer, Harris explores the endurance of tropes around Black masculinity that emerged during the early twentieth century. His use of multiple exposures and layering fractures the body to create jarring scenes, suggesting the tensions inherent to racial and gender performance.

 

Hudinilson Jr. (São Paulo, Brazil, b. 1957 – d. 2013)

Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1957, Hudinilson Jr. is best known for his subversive, erotic representations of the male figure. A gay man coming of age under Brazil’s military dictatorship, Hudinilson Jr. sought out spaces to live and work on the fringes of Brazil’s conservative society. A member of São Paulo’s experimental art scene and underground nightlife, the artist worked in a wide range of media including Xerox art, performance, collages, and notebooks. Hudinilson Jr. developed a practice that explored the transgressive nature of the gay male body under dictatorship through the reproducibility of images and the myth of Narcissus. Yes, nós temos cu! (1978), his first Xerox series, shows various stages of peeling a banana— simultaneously a symbol of underdevelopment, an erect phallus, and an anus— as captured by the photocopier. In his later Xerox Actions, such as those documented in “Narcisse” Exercicio de Me Ver (1980) and Untitled (1980), Hudinilson Jr. would lay his naked body on the machine’s glass plate, capturing its fragmented shapes and textures. The interplay between the Xerox machine and the artist’s body produced images that blur the line between representation and abstraction, inviting and refusing intimacy. Hudinilson Jr.’s explorations of the male body push against the heteronormative masculine ideal.

 

Dorian Ulises López Macías (Mexico, b. 1980)

Though Mexican photographer Dorian Ulises López Macías first began working in fashion as an art director for magazines like ELLE México, he is perhaps best known for his ongoing street photography project, Mexicano, which he shares on through the Instagram account @MexicanoMX. On his long walks through Mexico City, Macías found himself driven by the desire to photograph the people he was drawn to on the street— people whose non-European features were overwhelmingly absent in the fashion magazines where he worked. Many of Macías’s portraits are erotically charged, capturing the subject’s direct and uncompromising performance of masculine sexuality, as in Untitled, Mexico City (2016). Working across digital, analog, and cell phone photography, Macías’s intimate portraits capture the beauty of Mexico’s dark-skinned population. In doing so, Mexicano implicitly contests the Eurocentric beauty standards prevalent in Mexican media and questions the continued erasure of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Mexicans.

 

Antonio Manuel (Brazil, b. 1947)

Working in the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil, Antonio Manuel created performances and installations that spoke to the oppressive conditions of life under the military dictatorship. Experimenting with Neoconcrete, Pop, and Conceptual art, Manuel’s participatory and politically charged works were often at the center of debates around state censorship. In his photographic installation The Cock (1972), which documents a performance of the same name, the artist sits half naked inside a large straw nest resting on top of a dune while protecting a golden egg. Performing as both the cock— a symbol of male virility— and the hen— the mother to and protector of the egg— Manuel’s performance questions gender roles, investigating the intersection of gender, artistic practice, and oppression. In 1973, documentation of The Cock circulated in the newspaper O Jornal as part of a six-page spread titled Antonio Manuel Exhibition: From 0-24 Hours. Manuel often appropriated the format of the newspaper as a means to circulate his work and writing to a broader audience, inventing news stories with texts that dealt with censorship, ethics, and aesthetics. As if intended to underscore problems with state censorship, the wide circulation of The Cock and Manuel’s radical investigation of gender roles led the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro to immediately cancel Manuel’s upcoming solo exhibition.

 

Robert Mapplethorpe (USA, b. 1946 – d. 1989)

US photographer Robert Mapplethorpe became notorious in the 1970s and 1980s for his black-and-white portraits of the gay community. Photographing artists, musicians, socialites, and celebrities, Mapplethorpe’s practice pushed the conventional boundaries of photography through his careful and, at times, detailed investigation of the human body. As in his iconic portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mapplethorpe’s photographs often explored the ideals of masculinity through representations of the male nude. In this series, Schwarzenegger is depicted semi-nude and performing a pose reminiscent of classical sculpture. Every muscle in Schwarzenegger’s back is captured in detail, emphasized by the dramatic interplay between light and shadow characteristic of Mapplethorpe’s work. Entirely on display and idealized, Mapplethorpe invites the viewer to praise and admire Schwarzenegger’s muscular figure, examining the relationship between the broader ideals of masculinity and the muscular male body.

 

Marisol (Venezuela/USA, b. 1930 – d. 2016)

Venezuelan-American artist Marisol is best known for her assemblages and sculptures that frequently blended Pop Art imagery with pre-Columbian and South American folk art references. Though her art changed over the many decades of her career, Marisol maintained a fundamental interest in the human condition, often exploring gender roles and using herself as a model in her own work, incorporating images and casts of her body and face. One of Marisol’s most iconic sculptures, Love (1962), features a plaster cast of the artist’s face drinking from a bottle of Coca-Cola. Marisol later revisited this imagery in Paris Review (1967), which translates Love into flat, graphic form. In Paris Review and Love, Marisol explores the relationship between consumerism and sex. The Coke bottle takes on a phallic identification, transforming the act of drinking into an unsettling sexual encounter that shifts between consensual and forced.

 

Marta Minujín (Argentina, b. 1943)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1943, Argentine artist Marta Minujín is considered a leading figure of conceptual art and a pioneer of happenings, performance, participatory, and video art. Though inspired by the experimental work she was exposed to by studying and working in France and the US, Minujín’s practice is greatly influenced by the writings and teachings of Argentine semiotician and art critic Oscar Masotta and the Argentine tradition of protest against dictatorship. Her actions often employ elements of surprise and destruction, as in The Obelisk Lying Down (1978), which the artist installed at the 1978 São Paulo Biennial. Minujín conceived of The Obelisk Lying Down upon her return to Argentina (then under military dictatorship) from the US, where she found herself struck by the straightness and rigidity of the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. The Obelisk of Buenos Aires is a national monument located in the Plaza de la República and a symbol of male political power. Minujín’s toppled obelisk is an inherently phallic object that ridicules the masculine obsession with the penis, the ultimate symbol of male domination and control.

 

Carlos Motta (Colombia, b. 1978)

A historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Colombian artist Carlos Motta investigates problems of sexuality, gender identity, minority communities, politics, and religion. Working across video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, and performance, Motta’s practice often engages acts of self-representation to question normative discourses and the absences produced by dominant historical narratives. Untitled Self Portrait (1988) is part of an early series of works in which Motta transforms himself, performing for the camera in uncanny landscapes. As he becomes increasingly unrecognizable, his body, sex, and gender emerge similarly in flux and unstable.

 

Claudio Perna (Venezuela, b. 1938 – d. 1997)

A trained geographer and professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, Claudio Perna was one of the most significant photographers and historians working in Venezuela and the founder of the country’s Audio-Visual Archive. In the 1960s, he began experimenting with conceptual art, working across multiple mediums and technologies, such as film, photography, photocopy art, and performance. His expansive practice explored themes related to human geography, identity, memory, the archive, tropicality, and the presence of these themes in everyday life. Perna’s video, photography, and photocopy art often explored the topography of the male body to challenge traditional notions of masculinity, as in Figura de Claudio Perna en Secuencias Fotográficas (1976), which presents the artist’s own body as series of fragments to push against the idealized male figure.

 

Richard Prince (USA, b. 1949)

US artist and photographer Richard Prince, born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone, is best known for his strategic appropriation of images. Prince is a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists working across photography, film, video, and performance that explored identity as a sociopolitical construct by appropriating images from mass media. After moving to New York, Prince worked in Time Inc.’s tear sheet department, removing articles from advertisements. Left with the remains— glossy photographs of models and other objects of desire— Prince began to re-photograph these images. Altering and enlarging them, he explored the relationship between identity and the meaning of images in consumer culture. In Untitled (Cowboy) (1980-84), Prince re-photographed Marlboro cigarette ads, zooming in on the figure of the cowboy, an icon of masculine US culture and a symbol of rugged individualism.

 

Herbert Rodríguez (Peru, b. 1959)

Born in Lima, Peru in 1959, Herbert Rodríguez studied fine art at the Pontificia Universidad Católica. Rodríguez was active in Lima’s experimental art scene and underground culture movement during the late 1970s and the early 1980s. As a member of the E.P.S. Huayco workshop, the collective Artistas Visuales Asociados, and the Las Bestias group, Rodríguez was exposed to experimental techniques and punk and Dada aesthetics. Working across painting, collage, assemblage, photocopy, and prints, Rodríguez is best known for his artistic responses to the turmoil in Peru during the 1980s, known as the Lost Decade. Rodríguez collects juxtaposing images and texts in newspapers and magazines to critique political oppression and the hypocrisies of everyday life in Peruvian society. Works like Pinga II (2019) are emblematic of Rodríguez’s collages, which draw upon a vast array of found images and texts. Hyper-sexualized photos of women form a large, erect penis encircled by clippings of newspaper headlines detailing violent acts against women and children, critiquing the media’s role in normalizing gendered double standards, phallocentrism, sexism, and masculine aggression.

 

Miguel Ángel Rojas (Colombia, b. 1946)

Colombian conceptual and multimedia artist Miguel Ángel Rojas’s practice focuses on subjective experience, identity, and politics. Initially training to become an architect, Rojas eventually enrolled in a fine arts program at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1969. Rojas began experimenting with photography, making long-exposure portraits and self-portraits. In the 1970s, he began his Faenza series, documenting the sexual encounters of gay men at movie theatres in Bogotá. Rojas took these photos secretly, partially concealing his camera in his jacket or suitcase. The resulting photographs are blurred, ethereal images that capture the fleeting sexual and emotional encounters of the gay community in Bogotá that was forced to operate at the margins of society. Faenza also marks a significant shift in Rojas’s practice towards exploring his own subjectivity through a sustained photographic project.

 

Hugh Steers (USA, b. 1962 – d. 1995)

Born in Washington, D.C., to a politically affluent family, Hugh Steers developed a passion for drawing at a young age. After studying painting and graduating from Yale University in 1985, Steers moved to New York. There he became an active member of the city’s vibrant artistic milieu. Steers’s dreamlike paintings capture the everyday domestic life of his inner circle and the relationship between his subjects’ physical and psychological interiority. Diagnosed with AIDS at the age of 25, Steers portrayed the increasing emotional and psychological toll of the epidemic and explored themes such as compassion, despair, fear, and mortality. In the works High Heeled Embrace (1989) and Dressing (1987), Steers presented intimate and melancholic portraits of men dressed in women’s clothing embracing each other, further expressing the comforting fragility of these relationships. Steers died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 32.

 

Hank Willis Thomas (USA, b. 1976)

New York-based conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas investigates the intersection of identity, media, and popular culture. Thomas is particularly invested in exploring how media and advertising reinforce particular ideas about race, gender, and ethnicity.  With his series Fair Warning (2012), Thomas refers to cigarette ads featured in publications, such as Ebony and Jet, that targeted black readers in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Reducing the advertisements to just the text boldly printed in white on sparkling black carborundum paper, Thomas reveals the sexual and phallic innuendos of advertising slogans, as in “Yes, longer yet milder” and “Measurably long… immeasurably cool.”