2014
Am I Going Too Fast?
Hank Willis Thomas is a photo-conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He received a BFA in Photography and Africana studies from New York University and his MFA/MA in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts. Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the International Center of Photography, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including the MoMA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.
Christopher Myers is an author, illustrator of books for children and young adults, and an artist who lives and works in New York. He has written numerous books and notable essays, amongst them the much-discussed “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” which ran in The New York Times in 2014. He has illustrated books for authors including E.E. Cummings, Zora Neale Hurston, his father Walter Dean Myers, and Misty Copeland. He has collaborated with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Vietnam, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, and weavers in Luxor. He also co-directed with Hank Willis Thomas the documentary film Am I Going Too Fast? Myers’ work has been shown at MoMA PS1 (New York), Contrasts Gallery (Shanghai), Prospect Biennial (New Orleans), and The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard (Cambridge).
HD Video with sound, 8 mins
Am I Going Too Fast? is a digital tapestry of the intersecting worlds and interactions of craftspeople, shopkeepers, and ordinary folks whose lives have been transformed by new technologies, cell phone banking, and micro-finance; threads that weave together to form a web of connection and possibility in contemporary Nairobi. As The Guardian’s Sam Jones writes: “According to [Christopher] Myers, the popular western image of poverty is as stale as it is wrong. ‘It’s static: it’s this image of the idle poor and the child standing in the midst of rubble, and we really wanted to challenge that flatness and give a more nuanced and layered idea of what poverty is,’ he said. ‘Poverty is a lot of people working very hard; poverty is endless amounts of ingenuity, poverty is structural problems that haven’t been addressed, and we wanted to reflect all of that.’”
Related Program
I stood before the source
→
The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm.
Holiday hours: regular gallery hours are in effect until and including Saturday, December 6. The galleries will then be closed for the holidays, except for regular hours on Saturday, December 13. In 2026, the galleries reopen Monday, January 5.
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Sign up to receive our newsletter.
The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.