GREENSBORO, NC.- What do advertisements sell us? Products is the easy answer: potato chips, sneakers, refrigerators, lipstick, toys—the list goes on. Artist Hank Willis Thomas expands that list and points us towards the more complicated answer by revealing the ways that ads also sell us assumptions about race and gender.

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro presents the exhibition Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915–2015. In the exhibition, Thomas reveals ways that corporate campaigns have both marketed products to white women and marketed those women as a feminine standard. By removing the texts from historic advertisements, he offers a visual chronology of the perceived social roles of white women—a history he describes as “a fascinating one step forward, two steps back.” Simultaneously, he highlights the complex ways in which popular notions of virtue and power, beauty and desire, race and gender have long been bound together.

In a previous project, Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968–2008, Thomas focused attention on media images of and for black consumers, especially black men. By expanding that project to address images of white women, he questions why our understandings of identities—male and female, black and white—are often shaped in opposition to one another.

Today, issues of race and gender reverberate throughout our national dialogue. This fall, Americans may pass leadership from their first black president to their first female president—a possibility unimaginable a century ago. At the same time, however, news stories—detailing systemic racial inequities, sexual assault against women on college campuses, and heated debates over the rights of transgendered individuals—remind us that equality is not a given, and that discussions of race and gender remain both difficult and essential. Thomas offers these images as fuel for those important conversations.

Hank Willis Thomas holds a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from New York University as well as an MA in Visual Criticism and an MFA in Photography from California College of the Arts. His artwork has been featured in museum exhibitions around the world and resides in such important collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.