Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist and activist focused on themes relating to commodity, identity, media and popular culture. Experimenting with mixed media and mass-produced imagery, Thomas’ practice includes photography, sculpture, installation and more.
Thomas was trained in photography and employs both archival and contemporary imagery from popular culture to take on urgent questions: What is the role of art in civic life? How do advertising and visual culture create narratives that shape our notion of value in society? This exhibition covers 20 years (2002-22) of Thomas’s work and is drawn from the collection of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation. The exhibition features some of the artist’s most iconic and well-known artworks across a range of media, investigating diverse themes.
LOVERULES also highlights several important series, including Branded and Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America. In Branded, Thomas explores and re-contextualizes the history of brand advertising and sponsorship through the iconography of sport. In Unbranded, Thomas digitally removes advertising punchlines and logos, with both series thereby highlighting the consistently dehumanizing strategies of corporate media, the commodification of African-American identity, and how dominant cultural tropes shape notions of race and race relations.
“The most revolutionary thing a person can do is be open to change.” – Hank Willis Thomas
Critical awareness, civic engagement, collaboration and empathy are among the core invitations of Thomas’ work. Through the mining and reframing of iconic imagery and texts, Thomas connects historical moments of resistance to our lives today. With incisive clarity, he asks us to see and challenge systems of inequality while affirming our shared humanity to shape a better future.
This exhibition is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The presentation of this exhibition at UAMA is curated by Violet Rose Arma, Curatorial Assistant, and Olivia Miller, Director. Lead sponsorship is provided by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation with generous support from Dr. Peggy Jones and Alan Willenbrock.
About the Artist:
Born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey and raised in New York, Hank Willis Thomas earned a BFA from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). Additionally, he has received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.
Thomas’ work has been exhibited internationally and is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among others. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is a former member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.
Thomas’ public art practice includes permanent artworks around the country, including The Embrace (2023) on the Boston Common in Boston, MA, a statue that pays homage to the King family, Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King; REACH (2023), made in collaboration with Coby Kennedy, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL; and Duality (2023) at The Underline in Miami, FL. Additional public works include Unity, a monumental public artwork in Downtown Brooklyn, N.Y.; Love Over Rules, a neon installation in San Francisco, CA; and the sculpture All Power to All People in Opa Locka, FL. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and The Gun Violence Memorial Project.
Influenced by social history and the hard-fought, perennial battle for equality in all areas of his work, Thomas co-founded For Freedoms with artist Eric Gottesman, Wyatt Gallery and Michelle Woo. For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941) — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — For Freedoms uses art to encourage and deepen public explorations of freedom in the 21st century.
Thomas lives and works in New York.
