HANK WILLIS THOMAS | LIBERATION OF T. O.: I'M NOT GOIN BACK TA' WORK FOR MASSA IN DAT' DARN FIELD (FROM UNBRANDED: REFLECTIONS IN BLACK BY CORPORATE AMERICA)

For his series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, Hank Willis Thomas sourced print advertisements from 1968 (the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.) to 2008 (the year President Barack Obama was elected) that either featured African American subjects or targeted black audiences. By appropriating these images and stripping them of contextualizing text and logos, Willis Thomas created wholly new imagery so that viewers would be unable to understand the original intent of the advertisement. Willis Thomas stated that '(he) wanted to track “blackness” in the mind of corporate America over these years and thought that by digitally removing all the text, we could simply look at them as images' (Dis Magazine, 2013).

In the present image, football player Terrell Owens runs from a crowd in a market. Several figures run in his direction, most notably a Caucasian man with his arms outstretched. Removed from the original context of the advertisement, Owens appears to run in determination away from the man’s reaching arms, conjuring connotations of a runaway slave and master.