“I’m interested in finding new ways of revealing things that are kind of latent in a given image,” Hank Willis Thomas told Artsy in 2015. “I talk about my work as an archaeology in a sense, and I might consider myself a photographic archaeologist, or a visual culture archaeologist.” Thomas’s photographs are as much about examining context as they are about their subjects. He uses retroflection, creating mixed-media works that seem to be, from one perspective, figurations or landscapes in saturated color, but from another are scraps of fragmented archival material. In this way he examines the history of abstraction through the impact of appropriation and colonization. The Pace exhibition takes its name from a Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which was published in The Crisis magazine in July 1921. Though unknown at the time, Hughes went on to become a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. —Elena Clavarino