Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-law (from Unbranded Altoids)
In this digital chromogenic print, Hank Willis Thomas appropriates and recontextualizes vintage advertising imagery, stripping away brand identifiers to expose the racial coding embedded within commercial culture. The work draws its title from the 1977 blaxploitation film *Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-law*, layering references to Black popular culture and folklore over the slick aesthetic language of corporate marketing. Part of Thomas's broader *Unbranded* series, the piece challenges viewers to examine how advertising has historically commodified and stereotyped Black identity for mass consumption.
- Medium
- digital chromogenic print, mounted to acrylic, framed, a Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, label on the reverse, 2001, printed in 2006, no. 2 in an edition of 5
- Location
- Sotheby's, New York, NY
- Spotted At
- Auction House · Sotheby'sView on map
🔨 Auction Lot
Photographs
March 24, 2020
Estimate: $8,000 to $12,000
Lot 14
Artists in conversation
Barbara Kruger
American · b. 1945
Kruger similarly appropriates the visual language of commercial advertising and mass media to expose ideological and cultural power structures embedded in everyday imagery, using bold conceptual strategies that deconstruct how consumer culture encodes identity and control.
Glenn Ligon
American · b. 1960
Ligon works at the intersection of race, representation, and American popular culture, drawing from Black cultural history and found imagery to critically examine how Blackness has been coded and commodified within dominant visual and commercial narratives.
Carrie Mae Weems
American · b. 1953
Weems uses appropriated photographic imagery and text to interrogate the racial politics embedded in visual culture and media, producing conceptually driven portrait based works that challenge how Black identity is constructed and circulated through popular imagery.
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