, marks Thomas’s first-ever presentation with Pace Gallery. This debut exhibition showcases a selection of retroreflective artworks—which reveal latent images depending on lighting and the perspective of the viewer.

Over the last ten years, Thomas has mastered the retroreflective medium, creating mixed media works that reveal two distinct scenes transfigured by both ambient and flash lighting. Seen from one perspective, these artworks present bold figurations, abstractions, and landscapes in saturated colors; seen from another, fragmented archival scraps from Thomas’s production of other retroreflective works over the last decade are revealed. As these elements converge and transform, they shed light on new layers of images, ideas, and meanings that are hidden in plain sight. Thomas’s retroreflective works can also be understood as personal records of his artistic process and the historical references that recur throughout his practice.

Pace Gallery 

I've Known Rivers

a group exhibition organized by For Freedoms and presented at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. In this exhibition, Thomas commemorates the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. with 

, a new monument on the Boston Common. Thomas meditates on his concept of agape — the highest form of love that can only be known when we allow ourselves to let go of fear and anger, and recognize our innate interconnectedness. The exhibition was on view from January 12 through February 12, 2023, and is one of several events related to the unveiling of 

 commissioned by Embrace Boston, on January 13, 2023.

The artists included in the exhibition highlight the urgent need to rediscover the precedence of love in the midst of current cultural, environmental and political crises. They include artists from Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.: Paul Briggs, Erin Genia, Eric Gottesman, Ekua Holmes, DA Mekonnen, Helina Metaferia, Jo Nanajian, Kiyomi Quinn Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, and Yu-Wen Wu.

Praise Shadows Gallery

Let Love Quiet Fear

Ben Brown Fine Arts presented Hank Willis Thomas’s 

"Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, ‘Not really.'"

 This was the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Ben Brown Fine Arts and first exhibition at the Palm Beach gallery. The exhibition brought together a selection of recent works by the artist from his most celebrated series, including sports jersey textile works, lenticular text works, retroreflective prints, and a neon. Hank Willis Thomas is a multi-disciplinary, conceptual artist whose work explores notions of identity, race, politics, popular culture, sports, and history. His practice emanates from a bright vision of promise for the future, attained by both examining the past and creating a fresh visual repository to engage with these conceptions. 

Ben Brown Palm Beach

A Letter from the Curator, Nancy Spector:

"I pitched this exhibition to you during a time of deep despair. The social contract I grew up believing in seemed to be shattering around us in myriad ways. Every news report brought accounts of fundamental rights being eroded by a power-hungry political party that feeds on hate, fear, and greed. How else to explain legislation that suppresses the vote or curtails reproductive freedom or makes teaching the history of this country with all its sins and blemishes a crime? How else to explain climate-change denial? Or the epidemic of school shootings? Or the disavowal of truth and the threats to democracy? I kept wondering whether art—which itself has been the target of so-called culture wars—could ever really have an impact on the consciousness of a country or at least critical constituencies that comprise it. I was haunted by the question: was it more important to be in the trenches, literally enacting dissent, than making exhibitions that describe it? I realized, however, that this is not an either/or proposition. Activism can take many forms, evocation and inspiration among them. Art, in its guise as agit-prop, is a call to action against a specific social or political threat, and there is a rich history of this kind of representation. Such art always accompanies people into the street as they march against injustice in the form of banners and signs, amplifying their grievances and demands. Art can also be complex, even obscurant, in order to infiltrate and destabilize representational systems that maintain the status quo. At the same time, art can bear witness, documenting crimes against humanity and the necessary actions 120 Walker Street New York 10013 paradise@offparadise.com Off Paradise taken to repair those wrongs. But it can also soothe. Art can be a much-needed pause, an invitation for contemplation, a touchstone for pleasure. Even the most ardent activist requires time out to recharge. Paul Chan embraced this truth when he curated a show on bathers and the recuperative power of water as part of an exhibition I once organized called Artistic License. This exhibition threads a needle between representation and real-world dissent. It features the work of artists who, to borrow a phrase from Richard Prince, “paint the protest.” They portray the very language of opposition, the semiotics of rebellion. Their art reminds us of our constitutional right under the first amendment to “peaceably . . . assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” But it also reveals, especially now, the fragility of that right in the face of a democracy under siege, and its virtual non-existence in other parts of the world. As I write this, in September of 2022, people in Iran are risking arrest or even death to protest the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was taken into custody by the “morality police” for some minor infraction of their dress code for women. And Russian citizens are defying authoritarian law to demonstrate against Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Paint the Protest is, in the end, an expression of hope. It is a reminder that as the public, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “we are a civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies.” The works in this exhibition reflect that shining moment—the opposite of despair—when a sense of moral outrage and compassion for one another conjoin into a collective demand for equity and truth. While the future is unknowable, we must believe that in our small cultural corner of the planet, art can and will be a beacon for change. With gratitude, Nancy."

Off Paradise Gallery

Paint the Protest 

NXTHVN, an international art institution in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, CT, exhibited CAUSE COLLECTIVE’s 

. An audience was invited to complete the prompt “the truth is…” on large balloons that float throughout the gallery space. The personal truths written on the balloons become part of the collective experience of the exhibition, with messages added throughout the life of the installation. 

 aims to ignite conversation, inviting viewers to approach their varied perspectives on value and truth with a new sense of understanding. The exhibition also included balloons with phrases from an accompanying poem composed by Thomas and Alexiev, such as "the truth is i respect you," "the truth is i welcome you" and "the truth is i need you."

As a compliment to the balloon installation, a video of “truth is…'' messages gathered from the public by The Truth Booth—a touring, inflatable booth developed by The CAUSE COLLECTIVE that traveled around the world. A vibrant speech bubble bench titled,

, was installed at NXTHVN’s facade, inviting visitors to rest, contemplate and reflect.

First exhibited at the University of California at San Francisco in 2007, the

 is part of Thomas’ ongoing series of interactive installations that are intended to ignite conversations and create circumstances for deliberate participation.

Referencing Andy Warhol’s "Silver Clouds," which originally debuted in 1966, 

provides viewers a new point of entry to actively engage with the arts with candor, by considering who we are, what we value, where we come from and where we are going—both in and outside the walls of NXTHVN.

NXTHVN

the truth is i am you 

This exhibition featured selected pieces from an exceptional promised gift to the NCMA from the collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull. Amassed over the past three decades and still ongoing, the collection included seminal works by Abraham Cruzvillegas, Vanessa German, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Graciela Iturbide, Pope.L, Tina Modotti, Gabriel Rico, Alison Saar, Hank Willis Thomas, Nari Ward, and many others. This transformative gift significantly expanded the scope of the People’s Collection. It augmented works by artists currently in the collection and added works by artists previously not represented, enabling the Museum to present a comprehensive picture of the many major movements and artists in contemporary art.

Gravitating toward artists who, as they describe it, “have something to say,” Fischer and Shull, based in Asheville, NC, and Merida, Mexico, have built a dynamic and ambitious collection since they started acquiring art in 1993. Looking across their gathering of artists, one can find connections between them that challenge the status quo and diverge from dominant historical perspectives around identity, power, resistance, and agency. Many of these pieces contain a sense of physicality and materiality, with tangible evidence of the artist’s hand in the creative process.

Fischer and Shull continue to establish spaces for social advocacy and community-centered art practice in their collection as it grows and develops. The collection reflects an awareness of power dynamics and institutional barriers, specifically in respect to women, Black, and Latinx artists. As the pair states, “Part of our commitment to the arts is a feeling of responsibility to participate in the global discourse that seeks to rewrite many overlooked histories and to provide an avenue for conversation and understanding.”

North Carolina Museum of Art 

Start Talking: Fischer/Shull Collection of Contemporary Art

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” ― René Magritte

Jack Shainman Gallery presented Hank Willis Thomas's, 

 across both Chelsea spaces. Comprising large-scale sculptures, mixed media textile works, and retroreflective prints, this exhibition of new work continues Thomas’s exploration of color theory, gestures of unity and strength, and the many ways we can look at a given historical moment or subject. 

Thomas’s retroreflective works exhibit an interest in the repetition of mass-produced imagery and attention to the hand of the artist, referencing works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Trained as a photographer, Thomas has always focused on framing and context, and often appropriates archival images along with new or rarely used technical processes. Viewers are prompted to shift their position or use a tool to see a moment in its entirety. For instance, by activating his retroreflective work with a flash photograph, the viewer reveals the latent image, thereby stepping into the role of image maker. In both form and content, the works revealed multiple ways to look at a given historical moment or subject.

In these most recent retroreflective works, Thomas drew aesthetic inspiration from artworks by Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein—artists who investigated color, shadow, perception, and popular culture—in addition to television test patterns and color bar configurations. Interested in a conceptual analysis of color theory, Thomas layers each composition with historical moments of protests and protestors in order to provide a greater commentary on what is left in and out of the frame, as well as the aesthetic information that can be derived from isolating parts of an image. By obscuring elements of the image, and prompting the viewer to reveal them, Thomas makes Magritte’s concept of “a sort of conflict [...], one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present” not just conceptual but experiential.

As Thomas continues his internal exploration of what it means to be an “American,” he has begun to view nation states as creative collaborations, and artists as the greatest problem solvers. The gesture-focused sculptures throughout the exhibition reference fleeting moments full of tension, ones in which we hold together while outside forces try to pull us apart. In the artist’s punctum series, inspired by Roland Barthes’ photographic theory of punctum, which refers to the detail in an image that pierces or stays with the viewer, Thomas uses sculpture to memorialize significant moments by isolating these gestures and investigating their ability to communicate ideas about individual and collective identity, ambition, perseverance, unity, and community.

When conceptualizing a large-scale monument to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Thomas reflected upon the King legacy and one image—one idea—emerged above the others: Embrace. On multiple occasions, the nation witnessed the Kings embracing on the frontlines of a march. A monument that captures this gesture declares that love is the ultimate weapon against injustice. In evoking the love shared between the Kings, their commitment to each other, their community and country, The Embrace is about what we share, not what sets us apart. By highlighting the act of embrace, this memorial shifts the emphasis from singular hero worship to collective action. In this exhibition, visitors will be able to see a domestic-sized version of the large-scale public monument, which will be unveiled in Boston Commons in January 2023.

In line with the theme of memorialization, Thomas has continued his embroidered star flag series, Falling Stars. Each embroidered star represents a life lost by gun violence in the United States - 

 in 2021. Gun violence is a perpetual issue in the United States, and for many Americans, a personal one. It was for Thomas when his best friend and cousin, Songha Willis, was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000. The grimmest fact to face in the wake of Songha's death was that it was not unique in this country. In 2018 Thomas said, “There have been more than 500,000 people [shot to death] in the United States since my family lost Songha. It is impossible to measure the magnitude and impact of this societal loss. While this installation is a memorial to the thousands of people who were killed by guns, it also pays homage to the countless loved ones who carry perpetual grief and trauma as unacknowledged victims of gun violence in America.”


Jack Shainman Gallery

Everything We See Hides Another Thing 

Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising

 traces the artistic manipulation of advertising, the most powerful, mainstream visual language. Since the 1970s, creative innovations led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, as photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life, and later to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer. By exploiting advertising’s visual vocabulary and adopting its sites and formats, and through re-photography, appropriation, and simulation, artists create a shared photographic language that puts the onus on the viewer to determine what exactly these pictures are asking of us.

Participating artists included Adbusters, Lucas Blalock, Victor Burgin, Jo Ann Callis, Sarah Charlesworth, Sara Cwynar, Victoria Fu, Sanja Iveković, Elad Lassry, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kruger, Carter Mull, Pat O’Neill, Kim Schoen, Sandy Skoglund, Mitchell Syrop, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Parrish Art Museum has invited Hank Willis Thomas and For Freedoms–the artist coalition he co-founded with Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery with the mission to model and increase creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action—to consider the Museum as a site for works that encourage new ways to experience art, architecture, landscape, and community. On view in the Parrish galleries, outdoors on the Museum grounds, and as digital billboards on the Shinnecock Monuments on Sunrise Highway, 

 includes nearly 30 works by 12 contemporary artists—many created specifically for the exhibition—in mixed media, sculpture, site-specific installation, wall painting, and photography.

The participating artists have collaborated with For Freedoms to encourage audience participation through art, collaboration, and cultural strategy. A robust schedule of public programs during the run of the exhibition will delve into overarching themes and specific works.

Planned in conjunction with For Freedoms’ ongoing campaign, 

, the works on view will be a call to the community to reconvene, and reconsider what justice can be in a time of imbalance. Together, they will ask the viewer to imagine a just world. How do we get there from here? What is your role?

While Buckman’s embroideries explore joy as an antidote to violence against women, Minaya’s collaged photographs of camouflaged figures address idealization of female bodies. Olujimi’s drawings of U.S. presidential assassins ask who gets to render justice and on whose behalf? Thomas’ large-scale textile works, made of deconstructed U.S. flags and prison uniforms, investigate the fabric of our nation, while Gottesman obscures or reimagines images of violence and appropriated indigeneity by white makers. Council’s sculptures, built from factory conveyor belts and painted in brilliant color, relate to her family’s history working in the nearby potato fields. Outdoors, Malik’s boat evokes a collective travel towards a more just world, and Thomas’ neon sign honors those who actively participate in society but are not often recognized.

Works by Indigenous artists Dennis (Shinnecock), Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee), Miranda-Rivadeneira (Ecuadorian, Chi’xi), and Watt (Seneca), will be shown on the nearby Shinnecock Monuments, 62-foot-tall electronic billboards put up by the Shinnecock Indian Nation along the highway in 2019 to generate revenue for the Nation. The digital billboards included in this presentation engage with the Land Back Movement and invites the viewer to consider their own relationship with the land.

Parrish Art Museum

Another Justice: US is Them

The outdoor group sculpture exhibition exhibition 

Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape was 

held throughout the  grounds of the Montalvo estate. The exhibition presented a series of works by local and national artists that reimagine how the body is represented in landscape and upend the exclusionary figurative traditions that dominate historic American gardens and other civic and public spaces.

A historic property, Montalvo was originally home to politician and patron of the arts James Duval Phelan. Phelan was the first popularly elected Senator of California, active in the movement to restrict Japanese and Chinese immigration to the United States. His failed reelection campaign featured the racist slogan, “Keep California White.” Montalvo’s 175-acre park contains a number of neo-classical figurative allegorical sculptures and portrait busts. These works were part of Phelan’s original art collection.

Historically, figurative western sculpture has emphasized idealized representations of the human body in white marble statuary drawing on the classical tradition. This tradition has perpetuated narratives of whiteness claiming and occupying public space to the exclusion of other identities and body types. The works on view in this exhibition unsettle and destabilize this prevailing narrative, opening up critical dialogue and conversation and claiming space for wider representation and inclusion.

Some artists in the exhibition use figuration or the body as a tool to create work that protests injustice. With 

, Hank Willis Thomas depicts two disembodied arms in polished steel raised up. One arm wielding a nightstick is grasped at the wrist by another hand, suggesting an encounter between a protester and a policeman. Cassils’ 

 is an imposing bronze sculpture memorializing the resilience of queer communities and referencing the 20% increase in murders of trans people in 2012. The work was cast from the bashed clay remnant of the artist’s 

 performance where Cassils unleashed an attack on a 2,000 pound clay block in total darkness.

Other artists interrogate and critique the exclusionary traditions of western art history’s depiction of the body. Continuing her work exploring the skin tone palette as a meditation on colorism and the evils of racism, Pilar Agüero-Esparza presents 

. This 8-foot-tall, 20-foot-long serpentine sculpture constructed from graduating colored bands of intricately woven leather is an homage to the artist’s Mexican craftsman heritage, while also pushing against cultural traditions that value light skin tones and devalue dark tones. Oliver Jackson’s sculptures are informed by a deep understanding of global art history and the inequities and erasures embedded in the classical tradition. His work 

, brings together aesthetic traditions from Europe and Africa to reveal three figures-a couple with an infant-both emerging from and restrained by the marble form. The suggestion of bodies leaves the viewer to fill in the blanks with their imagination rather than imposing a specific identity or interpretation of who is depicted in the work.

 use figuration to celebrate bodies not typically represented in our public spaces and examine questions about who is represented and who is excluded. Exploring issues of personal identity, Wanxin Zhang presents 

, a large-scale ceramic bust treated with colorful drip-like glazes that obscure a visage loosely modeled after the artist’s face. The work captures the cultural duality that Zhang experiences as a Chinese American artist living in San Francisco. Alison Saar’s 

 is a work from a series of four that Saar conceived around each season. The series explore the cycles of nature, women, and creativity. As with many of her other works, 

 imbues the black female body with power. She depicts a curled up female figure who may appear vulnerable, but retains a forceful dormant agency.

 is part of Montalvo Arts Center’s broader institutional mission to take an honest and direct look at the ways in which it has perpetuated exclusionary practices in the past, as it works toward fostering a more inclusive, welcoming space for all.

Montalvo Arts Center

Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape

explores the intersection between text and image in contemporary art. Deriving its name from the field of semiotics, which studies the concept of representation and the creation of meaning, the exhibition draws on the relationship between verbal and visual language. The phrase Sign Systems encapsulates the notion of language as a whole and is inclusive of non-verbal language such as painting, illustration, traffic signs, graffiti and body language. 

Text and image have historically been two fields kept apart, separated by an arbitrary academic hierarchy. By engaging with the emergence in the 1960s of conceptual art and language-based art, 

aims to challenge this history, questioning the conventions of both painting and language. Drawing on the history of word art, 

 features artists such as Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha. Holzer and Ruscha’s use of text-based art moulded the characteristics of the post-Pop Art generation. For these artists of the Post-Pop and conceptual art movements, the use of language became increasingly important. Moving away from purely visual forms, artists like Holzer and Ruscha began to use words to place emphasis on the importance of ideas. These foundations have had a lasting impact on contemporary art. For example, Anna Liber Lewis and Allison Reimus use the interaction of text and image to shed light on notions of femininity, motherhood and consent. Similarly, Thomas’ conceptual art and Sam Durant’s visual wordplay engaged explicitly with socio-political issues and American History, such as the civil rights movement, capital punishment and police brutality. 

Unit London

Signs Systems

In art, the human body represents a primordial element of reflection, a starting point for contemplation on social, cultural, political, and metaphysical questions. Having fascinated generations since the start of civilization, the body has been portrayed through a multitude of ways, which is what 

Through the works of Nobuyoshi Araki, Francesco Clemente, David LaChapelle, McDermott and McGough, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hank Willis Thomas, Sue Williams, and the artist group Toiletpaper by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, 

 explores how the human body is portrayed, taking in morphology and spirituality.

 by Sandro Botticelli created between 1484 and 1486, glorifies the female body in all its divine beauty and sensuality. David LaChapelle’s contemporary version addresses the gradual change of approach to the depiction of the female body. In his version of the original painting, Venus is a tanned blonde, wearing a golden crown and a pair of jewel-encrusted heels. Unlike Botticelli’s painting, Venus is hypersexualized according to the beauty standards of current society, and there is an air of eroticism as symbolized by the conch shell held by one of the two men flanking her.

The aesthetic canons have depended on the values of a society in their given time. Ideals have varied widely from culture to culture, a reminder that diversity is integral to the human condition. As the body remains a means for expressing identity, many artists see the body as a way of commenting on identity politics: gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. In contemporary art, the representation of the body isn’t influenced by dogmas, canons, or schools, and doesn’t necessarily seek a positive reaction from the public. Rather they tend to seek a visual and intellectual statement through their art.

The works of Hank Willis Thomas and Lyle Ashton Harris presented in this exhibition are exemplary of this thought process. Their works convey powerful messages regarding identity, politics, and history through the reflection of stereotypical thought and the wounds of history. Using commercial campaign strategies, Hank Willis Thomas reveals how branding has shaped contemporary and historical Black identity in American culture, denouncing its embedded racism. Lyle Ashton Harris centers his work on the question of gender and identity using his own body to probe collective ideas about Black and queer identities.

While the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki and the semi-abstract works of Sue Williams focus on the violent and erotic side of desire and the human body, McDermott and McGough explore it through the lens of popular culture. In their paintings of film stills, religious and sexual practices are explored through the subversion of the obvious by incorporating homoerotic and art historical references.

Departing from the human body, this exhibition also looks at the immaterial side of the human body: the soul. While the body remains Francesco Clemente’s central subject, his work is deeply rooted in spirituality. Taking note from Hindu tradition, his series ‘Talisman’ connects the body to current emotions and common experiences. The placement of a talisman above genitals is a hymn to the body, elevating the body to a higher spiritual place. The mirror work by the artist group Toiletpaper, calls visitor’s attention to their bodily presence, triggering acts of affective, behavioral, and empathic mirroring. The viewer becomes aware of his corporeal presence triggering also the soul.

This exhibition celebrates the body and the soul as a whole: an invitation to reconnect with ourselves and others.

Maruani Mercier

Body & Soul

Featuring over twenty artists, the special exhibition 

 spotlights the myriad ways artists explore the symbol of the flag of the United States of America, underscoring its vast, divergent, and complex meanings.

Titled after Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 work, 

 provides a critical discourse on the symbol’s meaning, the complexity and contradictions of contemporary national identity, and artists as active citizens.

The exhibition was developed conceptually in the summer of 2020 during the groundswell of activism for racial justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor and was inspired by two works in the Broad collection, 

presents works from over twenty artists including Laura Aguilar, Nicole Eisenman, Jeffrey Gibson, Jaar, and Johns, as well as 

(1990) by Hammons acquired by The Broad in 2019 and 

(2021) by Hank Willis Thomas acquired last year. The exhibition includes works that both embrace the flag as the signifier of the nation and its ideals and subvert it to express injustices and inequities woven into the fabric of the U.S., past and present.

The Broad

This is Not America's Flag

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the National Basketball Association, Hank Willis Thomas presented a new series of artworks in an exhibition titled

 Coinciding with the NBA All-Star games in Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas’s new series was on view for four days only, 3-blocks from the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse at the Caxton Building. The topic of sports has long been a focal point for Thomas’s practice. Specifically, how identity, sports and politics interconnect. His work often examines the powerful presence sports has in history as well as today’s society. This exhibition includes six mixed media works and one large-scale stainless steel sculpture. “The New Black Aesthetic” takes its title from a 1989 essay of the same name by Trey Ellis where he describes the emergence of a new cultural identity influenced by the generation of African American athletes, artists and academics who found a way to thrive within mainstream American culture after centuries of exploitation and alienation. Ellis’ phrase refers to a movement, “the most exciting period” he’s ever known, of young Black artists who exist and thrive authentically in their entire complex cultural identity which “borrows and reassembles across both race and class lines.” 

The National Basketball Association and sports across the world can also unite across both race and class lines. Many Black athletes have become cultural icons that unify across the sports, races, class and even national boundaries. With their awe inspiring creativity and athletic prowess, these athletes also have access to new spaces and platforms. Using photography, sculpture and mixed media, Thomas explores the impact of sports, its logos, and its icons on the American psyche. 

Last fall, in celebration of the NBA’s 75 years, the NBA and Bleacher Report commissioned a lineup of talented, diverse artists from a range of disciplines to create original works of art inspired by the league. Thomas was one of the five artists who created an original work along with a set of artist editions and apparel inspired by their artworks. Thomas’ original work, 

reimagined the current NBA logo in jerseys from All-Star players throughout NBA history. 

Thomas continued that exploration in “The New Black Aesthetic” with five additional icons who could equally be representative of the league shown alongside That’s Game. The mixed media works depict these legendary athletes from the NBA: Kobe Bryant, Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Russel, and (current NBA logo icon) Jerry West. Inspired by various quilt traditions in the African-American South, Thomas has a long history of working with unexpected fabrics, such as old striped prison uniforms, US flags and sports jerseys. By utilizing such materials, Thomas requires the viewer to consider the bodies who have historically donned these uniforms, addressing our visual systems and their role in perpetuating inequality. The mixed media works in this show are made of deconstructed basketball jerseys then reconstructed into silhouettes of celebrated athletes who are emblematic of the league and the culture that has developed out of their individual and collective impact on and off the court. 

Thomas also presented a new, large-scale version of his well-known Liberty sculpture.

, Thomas creates a mirror-like, monumental, three-dimensional sculpture from a two-dimensional image inspiration. It is a continuation of Thomas’ Punctum series, based on Roland Barthes’ photographic theory of the punctum, which refers to the detail in an image that pierces or wounds the viewer, creating a direct relationship between them and the pictured object or person. Thomas uses this concept to select or reframe areas of images, which he then transforms into large-scale sculptures as part of his interest in popular culture, photographic history, and sports as a metaphor for individual and collective struggle. 

appeared in Life Magazine in 1986 and featured Meadowlark Lemon, Harlem Globetrotter No. 36, in front of the Statue of Liberty, spinning a basketball on his finger. Thomas started by creating a life-size sculpture of the moment from the arm of retired NBA All-Star Juwan Howard. The resulting work plays with the notion of cropping, isolation, and scale. Furthering this exploration of the moment, 

 is a larger-than-life version rendered in a polished finish so that the viewer finds themselves part of the work. Thomas’ Punctum series encourages us to contemplate framing itself: what is left in or out of a photograph, narrative, or account of a historical event, and why?

Caxton Building

The New Black Aesthetic

In 2018, the Delaware Art Museum partnered with organizations throughout the city of Wilmington, Delaware to mark 50 years since the powerful and community-changing public response that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Civil disturbances in Wilmington followed by a nine-month-long occupation by the National Guard left an indelible mark on the community. The Museum commissioned Hank Willis Thomas to respond to the events of 1968 through the creation of a new work of art that sheds light on this complicated moment in the city’s history. Following the exhibition, the Museum acquired Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot from Thomas for the benefit of the communities it serves.

"The past is always present. It is not always visible, but like the molecules that we are composed of, it is everywhere, ever-changing, and always part of us" - Hank

Hank Willis Thomas explores the complexities of race, gender, and class in his photography, sculpture, and video-based artwork. For this project, he combined historic News Journal photographs with the historic pamphlet Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot. Informed by the uprisings of 1967, Cold War-era nuclear fallout pamphlets, and guides published for African Americans to navigate institutional racism during segregations laws, the booklet serves as a practical manual for surviving an occupation. The guide outlines that police and media response will be followed by business closures, electricity outages, and travel restrictions. Provisions—food, water, and basic medical supplies—must be gathered, and those under siege must also know how to provide basic care for medical emergencies.

Thomas created a powerfully unique physical and visual viewing experience by combining image and text on retroreflective vinyl – a material widely used in road signage. The pages of the survival guide are activated when a flash of light catches the News Journal photograph underneath. Events on the verge of being lost to historical amnesia are revealed again. With this rediscovery, the viewer is placed in the position of the many individuals who directly or indirectly experienced these events—city residents, Wilmington firefighters, and National Guardsmen. For Thomas, this is how the past remains current, and how the “holes of narrative history” are exposed.

Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot

 is organized by Deleware Art Museum, Wilmington, Deleware. Support provided by Art Bridges.

El Paso Museum of History

For centuries, artists have told and retold the complex histories of the African Diaspora. Explore this enduring legacy in the exhibition 

, which takes an in-depth look at the historical experiences and cultural formations of Black and African people since the 17th century. More than 130 powerful works of art, including paintings, sculpture, photographs, and time-based media by artists from Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, bring these narratives to life.

This exhibition was initially presented as 

 in 2018 by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Brazil.

National Gallery of Art

Afro-Atlantic Histories 

Are there too many images in the world? A new exhibition looking at our compulsive fascination with the proliferation of photographs, 

A TrillionSunsets: A Century of Image Overload

, will be on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) from January 28 through May 2, 2022. Curated by David Campany, ICP’s managing director of programs, 

 explores mass media excess and image over-saturation through more than 50 works from the 1920s to today.

Among the photographs, books, and films on view in

including images from ICP’s collection, had works by Thomas, Nakeya Brown, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, Hannah H.ch, Justine Kurland, Louise Lawler, Barbara Morgan, Richard Prince, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Pacifico Silano, Sheida Soleimani, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, and Guanyu Xu.

The exhibition was be showcased in ICP’s downtown building at 79 Essex Street in New York, which opened in January 2020 and unites the museum and ICP’s school for first time in over 20 years. On view concurrently will be Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, which features photographs that are uncanny dimensional doubles for the objects they depict.

From picture scrapbooks to internet memes, to collage and image appropriation, to art made by algorithms, A Trillion Sunsets offers powerful insights and new perspectives on our long lovehate relationship with images, highlighting unlikely parallels and connections across decades.

With the rapid increase in illustrated magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, commentators began to ask whether society could survive the visual inundation. Since then, the art movements of Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Situationism, Conceptualism, and Postmodernism were all, in different ways, horrified and mesmerized by the seemingly endless image supply. Artists have cast a critical eye over the cliches, stereotypes, and repetitive pictures, and looked to unearth alternative histories and counter-narratives, re-presenting and reinterpreting forgotten images and archives.

“Have your way with images, or they will have their way with you,” says curator David Campany. “With this exhibition we explore very contemporary questions in the context of a rich and fascinating history.”

International Center of Photography

A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Image Overload

Founded in 2016 by artists Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, 

 formed as an artist-led organization that produces artist activations, community programming, exhibitions, and nation-wide campaigns to encourage social engagement and spark civic joy. In just five years since their founding, the 

 network has grown to become the largest community of artists, cultural workers, and organizations in the country. Together, this network shares knowledge, builds art, agitates for change, and works to radically reimagine national conversations.

Driven by some of the most urgent social issues of our time, 

 believes that if creativity is a core societal value, if artists are at every table, new ideas are more likely to take hold. Working as a collective to center the voices of artists in public discourse, 

 seeks to expand what participation in a democracy looks like, to get out the vote, and to initiate a deeper conversation about the role of art in local, national, and global politics. The name For Freedoms was inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime address that called for the safeguarding of four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

—a 19th century antebellum youth movement that used art, song, and public rallies to push for the abolition of slavery. Drawing from the spirit of that movement as well as the visual vocabulary of cloaks, flags, and the symbol of an open eye, 

 movement is an invitation and an offering, welcoming all who are interested to gather under a new model of creative action. Defining the project, they said, “We believe art has the power to wake us up. Art is a megaphone for unheard voices that need amplifying. Art gives us symbols to gather round, builds community, and helps us realize we are not alone. We make the culture, we are the culture, that makes the future.”

Utah Museum of Contemporary Art 

Our Wake Up Call For Freedoms

, a group exhibition that included Thomas's work. The show shines a contemporary lens on the gallery’s 2005 exhibition 

, which juxtaposed Black Panther materials from the gallery collection alongside works by contemporary artists. This creative exchange highlighted the culture of the 1960s and the development, goals, and achievements of the Black Power movement – the call for people to define themselves and the world on their own terms. By expanding this concept across the 30,000 square feet of The School, the exhibition offers an opportunity to broaden the dialogue and display these pieces in an environment that encourages contemplation and learning.

In an issue on view from The Black Panther dated July 3rd, 1971, the headline reads “

”. An article sharing the same title goes on to discuss the realities of media in the late 1960s and early 1970s, underscoring the emergence of the Black actor on screen. While there was an acknowledgement of progress in the casting of Black actors in anti-stereotypical roles, there was an equal consideration of a problematic history in place. Above all, the article holds an even more critical awareness of the necessary work that remained to affirm these actors’ presence and representation onscreen.

Reflecting on the term ‘progress’ found so deftly and conspicuously in this particular issue, and the relationship it holds to the current exhibition on view, it would be a missed opportunity not to investigate the origins of the term in its linguistic form. 

Progress: a noun that asserts an action of going on, advancing, or moving forward. As a verb, a once obsolete term in the 18c, but resurged and retained in the newly formed America in the wake of its liberation from Britain. Ultimately, to mean in advance on the line of development or improvement. Etymologically, pro- (forward), -gradi (to step, walk, “a step.”)

 
A revisitation, if not reconsideration, of the 2005 exhibition 

 aims to question these same, enduring inquiries in both their greater sociopolitical context as well as the micro-framework of the show itself. What has changed these last 15 years, and to what extent have we progressed since?

The exhibition’s title quietly acknowledges that progress is a tender, fragile thing. Its interpretation can be broadly and openly considered, though as Nick Cave’s piece so adeptly ensures, there is value, weight, and inspiration in every part of the complex and nuanced path of progress.

In honor of the work and commitment the Black Panther Party showed to bettering its local communities, Jack Shainman Gallery will be donating a portion of the proceeds to Hearts of Gold, M.A.D.E. Transitions, Save The Hampton House and Soul Fire Farm. 

This Tender, Fragile, Thing

The Brücke-Museum houses the collection of the estate of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Part of it is a body of works of more than 100 cultural works from over 20 regions in the world – among them New Guinea, Congo, Mexico.

 at the neighbouring Kunsthaus Dahlem contextualises this part of Schmidt-Rottluff’s collection from a critical perspective for the first time. It is a presentation of the collection as well as a critical engagement with the format of exhibiting collections from colonial contexts. Contemporary artists and cultural practitioners were invited by curator Paz Guevara to engage with the works and their colonial history. Their artistic interventions offer propositions for new narratives and attempt to problematise and unlearn colonial continuities in the presentation of the collection.

The intensive artistic engagement with the history of collecting and exhibiting impulses debates on the critical indexing of works from colonial contexts, provenance research and the restitution debate within the Brücke-Museum’s active work through its collection history.

With works by Ruth Buchanan, Mariana Castillo Deball, Lizza May David, Marina Dubia, Haytham El-Wardany, Manuela García Aldana, Lisa Hilli, Satch Hoyt, Saba Innab, Keiko Kimoto, muSa Michelle Mattiuzzi, Nnenna Onuoha, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Hank Willis Thomas and once known creators.

Brücke-Museum 

Transition Exhibition

Kayne Griffin presented Hank’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, 

 Comprising large-scale sculptures and mixed media quilted works, the exhibition of new work continues Thomas’ exploration of American iconography, color theory, and language. 

 will be on view from November 12, 2021–January 8, 2022.

Thomas’ recent works investigate the fabric of our nation—literally and figuratively—through the deconstruction and reconstruction of U.S. flags and striped prison uniforms. In drawing attention to the similarities of these materials, the artist navigates the complexity of distinguishing patriotism from nationalism. The work is part of Thomas’ negotiation of an enduring conundrum of the United States of America: Can “the land of the free” also be home to the largest prison population in the world?

The artist uses textiles from flags and prison uniforms to form abstract patterns and labyrinths of text that make reference to the founding ideals and complicated realities, past and present, of the American experiment. Though the 13th Amendment is popularly believed to have abolished slavery, in fact it intentionally created a loophole wherein the practice was allowed to continue as “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Through this loophole, the prison system has continued to exploit and trade human beings and profit from their free labor. In her groundbreaking book, 

, Michelle Alexander writes “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” Inspired by his desire to imagine the U.S. living up to its ideals of perpetually becoming “a more perfect nation,” Thomas embeds his own language into these charged materials, highlighting the significance across time and space of ideas such as “liberty,” “justice,” and “capital.”

Furthering the artist’s investigation into archival imagery and objects, 

, a monumental sculpture, is also included in 

 series. The series is based on Roland Barthes’ photographic theory of the punctum, which refers to the detail in an image that pierces or wounds the viewer, creating a direct relationship between them and the pictured object or person. Thomas uses this concept to select or reframe areas of images, which he then transforms into large-scale sculptures. Rendered in stainless steel and painted aluminum, these works challenge the viewer’s positionality within scenes of oppression and resistance, encouraging reflection upon one’s own relation to systems of power.

By magnifying select frames in three-dimensional objects, Thomas choreographs a spatial confrontation between his audience and the fraught subject matter of the original image. Depicting one hand stopping another’s swing of a police baton, Thomas’ 

by Russian-American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick. In isolating these disembodied gestures, the work prompts questioning of the enactment of justice: is justice the arm swinging the baton, or is it the force stopping it? Reflecting the viewer back in its polished finish, the work asks its audience, “What is your role in justice?”

This exhibition comprises one part of the greater 

, produced in collaboration with For Freedoms, the arts collective co-founded by Hank Willis Thomas. Taking place over the course of a year, the larger 

 invitation is a series of interdisciplinary projects and programs that contemplate what justice looks like internally and externally as we attempt to define our own needs and responsibilities, and connect that back to systems of power. This includes a series of billboards commissioned by the LANDBACK.Art campaign, a partnership between the organizations NDN Collective, For Freedoms, and INDÍGENA, centering upon the theme of “Land Back” in reference to the campaign led by Indigenous activists regarding decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Visible above Kayne Griffin is the billboard designed together by The Gabrielino-Shoshone Tribal Council of Southern California, artist Tekpatl Kuauhtzin, and photographer Josué Rivas. Across the country, For Freedoms and LANDBACK.Art have invited 20 Indigenous artists, community members, and their allies to illustrate their answer to “What does land back mean to you?”

The opening weekend will feature public programming elaborating on the themes within Thomas’ work, including a conversation Friday November 12th at 5pm with Wendy Staggs, Norma Cumpian, and Misty Napolitano, members of the Women Beyond Bars Initiative, UCLA Prison Education Program director Bryonn Bain, and UCLA Prison Education Program faculty-in-residency and For Freedoms Executive Director Claudia Peña. In addition, the programming will be accompanied by a breadth of supplementary materials for visitors.

, Thomas’ masterful manipulation of American iconography serves as a poignant reminder of the work that still needs to be done, initiating a call to action for new ways of relating to this country’s promise.

Kayne Griffen Gallery

Another Justice: Divided We Stand

A traveling Installation commissioned by the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and made in collaboration with MASS Design Group, and in partnership with Purpose Over Pain and Everytown For Gun Safety. The Gun Violence Memorial Project seeks to create a permanent, national memorial that honors the lives and narratives of victims of gun violence. Gun violence is a national epidemic that touches every community in America. The sheer scale of this epidemic often reduces victims of gun violence to statistics and ideas of change to empty promises. The Gun Violence Memorial Project launched at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. The exhibition features four houses built of 700 glass bricks, each house representing the average number of lives taken due to gun violence each week in America. Families who have lost a loved one due to gun violence contributed remembrance objects at in-person collection events. The remembrance objects are placed within a glass brick, displaying the name, year of birth, and year of death of the honored person. The memorial seeks to preserve individual memories and communicate the magnitude of the issue in a built space, and hopes to foster a national healing process that begins with a recognition of the collective loss and its impact on society. These installations are the first steps to recognizing the great need for a national, permanent memorial to gun violence victims, launched first in Chicago at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and currently on view in Washington, D.C. 