A Portrait of the Artist as an Optimist

Hank Willis Thomas’s art confronts today’s divisive issues—violence, racism, polarization—in hopes of inspiring mutual understanding and positive action.

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Andre D. Wagner

Fall Men’s Style/September 7, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hank-willis-thomas-artist-new-show-confront-divisive-issues-11662495935

Throughout the summer, drivers on Long Island’s Route 27 between Southampton and Water Mill have been passing the words “Remember Me” emblazoned in large neon script across the side of the Parrish Art Museum. A yearlong installation by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, those two words radiate with a sense of profound, if uncertain, meaning. Are they a plea? A provocation? An exhortation?

Maybe the answer is all of those things and more, suggests the Brooklyn-based Thomas, 46, who spends a lot of time thinking about the potency and relative truth of words, symbols, gestures and images. The source material for the Parrish piece was an old postcard with a picture of a young rifle-carrying Black man in a hat worn by the 19th-century U.S. cavalry regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers. “Remember me” was scrawled on the back. The fact that the phrase was handwritten “personifies it, activates it,” says Thomas. “We all want to be acknowledged and remembered.”Remembering, in many ways, is the core of Thomas’s art. Trained as a photographer, he has spent much of his career mining advertising, sports and pop culture images as well as documentary photos of protest, especially from the Civil Rights era. By incorporating these images into his work, Thomas reframes often overlooked historical narratives and highlights their intersections with contemporary issues of race, freedom and justice.

“In these extremely fractured times, Hank Willis Thomas is an invaluable convener of people and ideas, with a genuine desire to connect and foster dialogue, always with an eye to a path forward,” says Parrish curator Corinne Erni, who oversaw Thomas’s facade commission. She also worked with him to organize “Another Justice: US Is Them,” on view at the museum through early November. The exhibition features works by Thomas and 11 of his collaborators in the For Freedoms initiative, which he co-founded in 2016. A forum for artists to participate in public discourse, For Freedoms continues to expand its outreach and mission, which has extra resonance in this midterm season.

In addition to the Parrish exhibition, Thomas’s New York gallerist, Jack Shainman, has turned over both of his Chelsea spaces to a just-opened show of recent work, and the artist is finishing multiple public art projects, including a memorial on Boston Common to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

“What I love about his work is, on the one hand, it punches you in the gut, and on the other hand, it’s very forward-thinking,” says Shainman, who has worked with Thomas for nearly 20 years. “Hank is an optimist, I do believe.”

That optimism is reflected in the artist’s sculpture for the King memorial, The Embrace, a 20-foot-high circular bronze that depicts the Kings’ arms intertwined, based on a detail from a photograph of the couple embracing after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The monument is slated to be officially unveiled in January 2023, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Created with MASS Design Group, Thomas’s frequent collaborators, the memorial is literal and specific in its references—honoring the Kings’ commitment to their social justice work and to each other—but at the same time, the gesture is abstract and universal. “Not everyone can hug, but I’m pretty sure everyone has been hugged,” says Thomas. The design encourages visitors to walk into the center of the memorial, where an oculus opens to the sky above, “and they will be in the heart of the embrace,” the artist says. He likes to imagine the work as “the largest monument to love in the United States of America.”
Composed of some 600 pieces that were first 3-D printed before being cast in bronze, The Embrace is being fabricated at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state, where it will be welded into five segments and shipped across the country. The granite plaza beneath it will take the form of a labyrinth, or peace walk, designed with elements of African-American quilt patterns as well as plaques inscribed with the names of 65 local Civil Rights activists, all of whom participated in the Kings’ 20,000-strong march from Roxbury to Boston Common in 1965.

“Our proposal was to say, hey, what if we make this plaza its own memorial...to the ’65 march and elevate some of the unsung heroes of that period, the foot sol- diers, the people locally who fought for economic and social justice,” says MASS Design founder and executive director Michael Murphy. “This could be a catalyst for something bigger and not just something frozen in time, not just one story, but the beginning of hundreds of stories that we have yet to fully find out.” Murphy, who also worked with Thomas on the Gun Violence Memorial Project currently at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., adds that “one of Hank’s strengths is not just understanding how to tell stories but also demanding that we ask of those stories some- thing greater than ourselves.”

A five-foot-high version of The Embrace is included in the Shainman show, which is on view through the end of October, alongside several other sculptures and some of Thomas’s largest so-called retroreflectives to date. Printed on retroreflective vinyl, these works feature photographs—mostly historical—overlaid with washes of color, graphic patterns or painterly marks that partially obscure the primary image. Thomas plays with the fact that retroreflective surfaces appear most clearly in bright light. (Think car headlights on a stop sign.) What observers can see shifts as they move around the work, with the latent image only fully revealed by using a phone’s camera flash or flashlight held near one’s chin.

“Part of what I’m fascinated by with this work is that the viewer is constantly aware of their positioning and their orientation towards what they’re looking at,” says Thomas. “There’s a lot of passive viewing in photography, but in this case, the viewer becomes a photographer in a sense, using flash photography to actually make the picture.”
Some of the new retroreflectives combine Civil Rights protest images with references to celebrated artists of the era. In one, portraits of Freedom Riders emerge from the squares of an Ellsworth Kelly–style color grid. Another features a photo of Malcolm X beneath a re-creation of Roy Lichtenstein’s Mirror #2 (Six Panels), a work that was itself playing with visual representation and illusion. “I’m thinking a lot about these masters of art who figured out visual language graphically but have often left content wanting to be implemented,” says Thomas. “I’ve tried in my own way to take content that I was interested in and mixing that into these.”

Thomas also explores more recent politically charged imagery, superimposing a TV color bar pattern on a photo of the January 6 riots at the Capitol. He notes that without context, isolated images from that day can be hard to distinguish from other historical protests. “I’ve been fascinated with this concept of what gets peo- ple out of their houses to come together for something that they believe,” he says, “carrying symbols and signs to let the world know that they want to be seen.”

Most of Thomas’s new sculptures in bronze and stainless steel continue his exploration of gesture, depicting arms and hands variously clasping, grasping, reaching or, in one case, giving a peace sign. That work, titled Duality, is something of a corollary to his well- known sculpture Unity, a 22-foot bronze arm with the index finger pointing skyward that was permanently installed at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in 2019.

The show at Shainman also includes a small-scale version of a commission Thomas created in collaboration with artist Coby Kennedy for Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The 49.5-foot-long work, Reach, features a pair of arms extending toward each other, their hands about to touch. It will be installed in the airport’s parking and car rental center. “The desire to connect with another is definitely a running theme,” Thomas says.

Perhaps no body of work is more personal to the artist than his series “Falling Stars,” which was inspired by the death of his cousin Songha Willis, a close friend and mentor who was killed in a shooting in 2000. Oversize flags embroidered with thousands of stars— one for every person murdered by guns in the U.S. in a particular year—are hung from a wall, cascading onto the floor below. The three in the current show represent 2018 (14,916 deaths), 2019 (15,433) and 2021 (20,923).

“We have computer chips that can connect us with everyone across the world, but we can’t stop killing each other. That’s probably a crisis of imagination, and that’s where I think art plays a role,” says Thomas. “Say what you want about the power or impact of art at a gallery, but it is part of my attempt to bear witness, to call into loving action, and also to look sternly at who we are and ask the question of what do we truly represent?”

Ask Thomas for his take on the grim mood in the U.S., with polls indicating that a majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, believe things are heading in the wrong direction, and he doesn’t hesitate. “The polls don’t ask the important follow-up question, which is, What are you going to do about it?” he says. “Are you going to keep demonizing people who you disagree with? Are you going to just huddle and try to protect your little version of your safe community, or are you going to actually try to become an active participant in enhancing the things that you care about?”