One of the most prolific artists in the borough tackles issues of race identity, history, and popular culture

by evan Monroe

Hank Willis Thomas’s resume—including exhibitions, residencies, and awards—stretches for 13 tightly spaced pages. There is arguably no more prolific Brooklyn artist working today, and certainly no other who addresses with such sweep and dexterity race identity and popular culture issues. A photo conceptual artist, and inspired creatively by his mother, photographer Deborah Willis, Thomas has exhibited in The International Center of Photography, The Guggenhiem Museum Bilbao, Studio Museum in Harlem, Musée du quai Branly, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work is in numerous public collections, too, including The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2015, Thomas cofounded For Freedoms, the first artist-run super PAC, and he is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York. Close to home, his 2015 installation for the MetroTech Commons, “The Truth Is I See You,” was comprised, in part, of a sequence of lamppost signs with cartoon-like speech bubbles.

A pivotal moment in Thomas’s life was the murder of his cousin, Songha Willis, who was robbed at gunpoint and killed outside a nightclub in Philadelphia in 2000. Ultimately, a 2008 monograph book by Thomas, Pitch Blackness, charts his career as he grapples with issues of grief, black-on-black violence in America, and ways in which corporate culture is complicit in the crises of black male identity.

Two telling examples of his work are “Raise Up,” a sculpture based upon a photo by Ernest Cole, in which African miners are being subjected to a physical exam, and “Crossroads” (seen here), a photo that is part of a collaboration Thomas engaged in with artist Sanford Biggers.

“It addresses issues related to being on the borderline—the hybridity of cultural identity, but also about facing yourself,” Thomas explained of “Crossroads.” “How each of us, although we might have a certain complexion or cultural heritage, have a multitude of identities that complicate how we are seen…and that so many realities are changed by what our vantage point is.”

Hank Willis Thomas
Jack Shainman Gallery / 513 W 20th Street,
Manhattan / 212.645.1701 / jackshainman.com