Episode 11 When Love Over Rules: Hank Willis Thomas

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe

Race remix mix. Welcome to Race Remix Conversations with artists, performers, educators and thought leaders curated to help you unlock the power of imagination and experience the impossible as possible. The need for civic dialog has never been as important as it is today. In the U.S. and around the world, communities are facing complex problems, and finding solutions is contentious.

How can art help to bring people together to talk with each other across lines of difference, to listen and grapple with the hard truths, to understand the forces that shape civic life? We bring you a conversation with Hank Willis Thomas, a boundary spanning artist whose work asks us to look more carefully and to act more collectively. Our co-hosts are Professors Sam Alshaibi and Jennifer Saracino.

They speak with Hank about his exhibition, LOVERULES. The show has over 90 of his works, including photography, sculpture, installation and printmaking, representing two decades of a socially engaged art practice. In this episode, we learn why Hank believes all art is political. How he infuses a collaborative ethos to create opportunities for civic dialog. And how to tap into the radical power of love to heal individuals and communities on the brink of crisis.

The LOVERULES exhibition can be viewed through June 21st, 2025, at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, in partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer family Foundation.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Hi, everyone. I’m Sama Alshaibi , and I’m pleased to be in a recording studio with Jen Saracino.

 

Jennifer Saracino
Thanks, Sama. I’m really excited, too, because today we’re speaking with Hank Willis Thomas, a conceptual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work spans a variety of media materials and processes with iconic works, like the series of photographic prints titled Branded that depicts Black men branded with commercial logos. Branded is on display in the exhibition Les Overalls, currently showing in the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Another one of his works on display in the sculpture garden just outside the exhibition is Liberty. It features the cast bronze arm of an athlete, the retired NBA All-Star Juwan Howard. He spends a basketball on his index finger, a gesture that is reminiscent of the torch atop the Statue of Liberty.

So welcome, Hank. Thank you for being with us here today.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

 

Sama Alshaibi

So right now, we’re having your exhibition right here at the University of Arizona. And I was at the museum the other day, and I was confronted with one of my favorite photographs of yours. I think it’s called Scarred Chest. And it shows like the full chest of a male body branded with several Nike swoosh marks. I believe I saw that for the first time at the National Graduate Seminar at Columbia.

And your mom, the amazing Dr. Deb Willis, who I didn’t personally know at the time, I think I just met her for the first time there. She was presenting your work to the graduate students. So, this is 2004. Were you still in graduate school then?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah, I was.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Well, your mom was giving you a shot against your work, and I thought that was pretty amazing. And I looked at that. I’m like, this person’s going to go very far.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah. With your mom bragging about, you know.

 

Sama Alshaibi

No, because the work was that good. It was about a topic of that seminar was about mediated images. And so, I think it really fit in. Can you maybe describe that work and how you got to that project going way back here to grad school?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah. So that that image is called Scarred Chest. I don’t know if I was 2002 or 2003 and it is a photograph of a torso exclusively kind of dead on of a really chiseled brown body and on the chest other, I don’t know, are ten or Nike swooshes that look like their keloids on their chest. So, they look like they’ve been branded on that person’s body.

And I was thinking a lot about how slaves were branded and the United States people, enslaved people were branded as a sign of ownership. And how so often now we brand ourselves with products we buy or wear or drive or talk to people on. And also think about scarification and the ways in which people have used branding as a way to identify themselves with community and wanted to kind of highlight those dualities.

 

Sama Alshaibi

it’s interesting. I didn’t know about this the scarification component of that. So is that like referencing particular African tribal markers or more like tattoo work or something to besides that it’s obviously the branding of slavery.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah I think it but it’s not a specific community but just thinking about that, that form of beautification.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Amazing. Well, I guess that could start about that going back to like how did you get into making art? And I know that’s kind of probably a question you’ve answered a lot, but and we’d like to know a little bit about your how did you get here? How did you start being an artist?

 

 Jennifer Saracino

Can you share your earliest memory of art making?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Okay. Well, my mother, Deborah Willis, as you mentioned, is a photo historian, but also an artist and art historian and photographer. And when I was a kid, I remember her turning the kitchen into her darkroom where she was developing images that she was making. And on occasion, I would either help her with that or I would be making photograms where which are when you expose light sensitive paper to light with it with objects on top of them and create shapes and I’m taking my G.I. Joe’s and putting them on there and then bringing them to school.

It was really just so kind of a fun, early experimentation. And I just think because my mother was always so in love with photography, it was really critical to everything I did and the way I saw the world.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah. Do you think that her also being an art historian was very influential and in your creative process and this sort of subject matter you explore and I’m thinking about, you know, these sort of mass media, pop culture images, marketing, that sort of thing, this sort of like critique of…

 

Hank Willis Thomas

When I was a kid, my mother worked at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and she was the photo archivist and curator of photography and prints. And so, every day after school, I would go to my mom’s job.

Somehow play in the stacks. Literally play in the archive with my friend Frankie and Hankie and Frankie. And so through osmosis of just being at my mom’s job every day with her lectures and talks and kind of I remember seeing what James Baldwin and Sugar Ray Leonard and I remember there was a time when Nelson Mandela came there, like this was a time and a place where and one of the few places, frankly, where people from African descent all over the world felt like they needed to come to when they were in New York.

And our history was being preserved and shared there and nurtured there. And so that really gave me a huge admiration and love of the archive and appreciation for it. While I don’t think I consciously appreciated it, it was something that was really embedded in me. It’s like home.

 

Sama Alshaibi

So, speaking of home, let’s go back to your beginnings. You were born in New Jersey, grew up in New York. How did that influence you as an artist and your perspective, your development?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And I also lived in Philadelphia and went to high school in Washington, D.C..

So, I got to live in multiple places that had kind of different nuances that I found myself adjusting to. I only lived in Jersey for two years, so I can’t really speak to that. But going from New York to D.C. or from Philly to New York, those were places where the cultures were so different. Even what it means to be Black in those places was so different to be a boy and that time so different and I needed to, I got to navigate myself and express myself as a different person, which meant that I could shift lenses better than many other people who were my age.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah. And then. So, you stayed close to home to attend NYU or New York University?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Came back home. My mom was stuck in D.C. as she called.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Okay. But then you go west to study visual criticism and photography at the California College of the Arts and San Francisco, where you earned a dual M.A. and MFA in 2004. So what was Hank like in those days?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Same weird person I also. So, I graduated from photography and an Africana studies programs at NYU in 1998, and in 2001 those programs hired my mother. So I like to said paved the way for her. So even though I am a nepo baby, I feel like it’s been a little bit of reciprocal thing.

 

Jennifer Saracino

Yeah, you give back.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And again, I got to go from I went to NYU, which was a massive school. First I went to Duke Ellington School of the Arts, which is primarily African-American arts high school. And I was in the museum studies program, which is like the laughing stock of any art school, because they’re like, what are you guys doing there, papier-mâché? Read articles. And then.

 

Sama Alshaibi

We have one of the shout out to our museum studies program.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

So that’s at a university, this high school, you know, dork city. And then I went to NYU, which I was in the photography and Africana studies programs, but it was like New York was still kind of New York then and it’s kind of like waning, but it had some edge and had this really cosmopolitan experience there. But it’s a big school, big corporation, and then my mother told me about her friend Chris Johnson, teaching at this school called California College of the Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

And I just like, that’s a dumb name. So like 900 students, I was like, I should just go there. And because I wanted to go somewhere where I could, yeah, it’s like this is like, what do you do again? Papier maché.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

That. So they dropped the C because they were tired of that. And so now it’s called CCA, But each of these places again, I got there and it was a different thing of me because now I’m in this full arts environment, has a craft history and collaboration is really integral to it. And the politics in New York and also, frankly, the best thing about moving out West was and the East Coast Black people are the prodigal minority and moved out west.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And I was like, well, we’re like Forth and like learn about Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and like, you know, the Filipino movement, the Chicano movement, you know, Japanese internment. And I didn’t know any about anything, any of this. And I was like,

 

Sama Alshaibi

Wow.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I guess there’s more to American history than chattel slavery. So that was honestly, that really redefined my understanding of my own identity.

 

Sama Alshaibi

But I also think I heard you say that you didn’t want to be an artist for a long time. Is that right?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I still don’t.

 

Sama Alshaibi

But you’re kind of a prolific maker, from what I understand. Does it? Is it a necessity? Is it is it your employment? Is it just things in your head? You got to get out.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

All those. My favorite thing to actually do is to build community and to collaborate with other people on what I call generosity projects like Question Bridge and the Truth Booth and For Freedoms which or the Gun Violence Memorial Project or the Monuments Tour or Writing on the Wall. These are all projects that there is no money in it for me, but I need to have money so that I can do them.

And the real more rewarding than coming up with something on my own or even with a few people in the studio and putting it out in the world and maybe selling it is meeting a total stranger who’s willing to kind of open up their heart and their life and their experience to be a part of an artwork that me and my friends are making.

It’s way more fun to do something like that and way more fulfilling. And so when I think about my making and most of what I spend my time on is not stuff that people see, which is kind of funny to be considered prolific when it’s probably less than 50% of the things I do.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

But if you know anything about my mom, I’m a real slouch.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Well, I think your mom is the hardest working person I’ve ever met in my life.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

It’s like, well, she doesn’t. I think for her, there is no such thing as work. She might complain about it or stress. But like I’ve been saying for at least 25 years, like, you don’t really need to do this. This is life for her. She loves. She’s one of those people who loves what she does and that she like chilling is like for her, like taking a fish out of water.

She’s like, Let me just sit here. And she would say she would like something different, like she likes food or books. But like, you know, even when she’s writing books, she’s watching television. She doesn’t she can’t. She doesn’t. There’s no separation. And as a as a professor, as a parent, as a friend, as an artist, as a writer, she’s always she’s completely in flow.

 

Sama Alshaibi

I’m going to do everything in my power to not turn this into the Debra Willis interview because, you know, she’s a huge she’s a huge influence on so many of us. And obviously, she’s a mentor to me. She’s so many opportunities that she’s given me shows, experiences. And but I have to remember, when you gave her the award at the National Conference for Society for Photography and Photographic Education, and I, you know, besides this incredibly beautiful and touching speech you gave about your mom and sharing your mom that she was always giving too. Right? And helping people and mentoring and creating opportunities for.

I was just shocked about how many students came to honor her and the things that they said. And I, I just wanted to be like her is that I was a young professor at that time, a young teacher. I’m like, That’s who I wanted to be. Everyone keeps telling you to protect your time and protect yourself and have boundaries.

And she was like the opposite of that. She’s like, I want to live a completely committed, giving life. Right? And it it upended what I thought I should be doing in academia and as an artist anyway. And so.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

How does that serve you?

 

Sama Alshaibi

Well, you know, no one could be Deb. But I, I definitely I’m really glad I took that approach because life is much more filling. I don’t want. We spend most of our time at work, right? So, if you’re not loving with it and like, committed to it could definitely take over. So…

 

Jennifer Saracino

I’ll say as Sama’s colleague, she’s incredibly generous to her colleagues and her students.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Well, I learned it from Deb.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

You know, they say givers need takers. The gift is actually in the receiving of someone else desire to offer you something. So often we think that taking a selfish work. No, no, no, no. But we’re often rejecting someone else’s calling. And when we don’t receive those gifts. And so and I know that for certain, I can say with my mom and other people I witness and I say myself like, it’s good energy when people validate you by saying what you’re offering is worthy of my reception.

 

Sama Alshaibi

That’s beautiful.

 

Jennifer Saracino

It’s very beautiful.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Speaking of, speaking of giving, so you co-founded For Freedoms, which is an artist led organization and with collaborators, Eric Gottesman. Am I saying that right? Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery can tell us about For Freedoms. What is it?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And yeah, so I’ve done a lot of different creative collaborations. I’ve never really enjoyed the spotlight, I’ve never really like I’m very socially awkward. I always put my foot in my mouth and I’m not the best artist I know. I have always been gregarious and curious. I’m not the most courageous person I know, not the most thoughtful person I know.

And what collaboration gives me an opportunity to do is to be more than myself. So when I collaborate with another artist, another person, I get to be like, oh wow, I would never go out and do this, or I would never I would never take my time to do this or I would never keep my mouth shut here.

That’s what creative collaboration is. I mean, it’s mostly arguing about who’s right, but when you actually finish that, if you ever get anything done, it’s really beautiful because the things that we do are not no one’s full thing. The problem, though, is that we’re in Western societies obsessed with this concept of authorship and there is nothing that has ever been created that was not a collaboration and I get way more credit than I deserve.

And my collaborations and I’ve had probably 50 different collaborators, most of whom, if not all of whom I’m still good friends with or are like family with. And For Freedom’s just kind of the culmination of all of these different projects. And while I don’t really and the other thing is I also can’t stand the framework of founding, even though I think it’s rooted in in casting and sculpture.

But I think about founding is like I found it. It’s something that feels really paternalistic and kind of colonial about it, which, you know, colonialism kind of cool as a concept, but like, I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right because, you know, it didn’t begin with us. We were some of the people who were willing to like, put in a lot of the initial effort.

But I got most of the credit, sadly. But my friend William James, who’s an amazing artist and friend about 25 years ago, said he and he loved American football and he said, let’s play football. And I’m terrible at sports. But he created what they were calling the Cam Booey Intergender Interfaith Interracial Football League, where in Brooklyn and later in San Francisco, we would, a bunch of mostly creative people who would play American football and it was like rough touch, you know, and but the point of the game was to keep playing and forge a lot of great relationships out of that Wyatt and was part of the New York crew.

Eric was part of the the West Coast crew. And Eric and I stayed in touch because we were in a book together also with Wyatt and talked about politics from time to time. And he came to me and said he wanted to run me for office as an art project.

 

Sama Alshaibi

That’s great.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah, I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. So I was like, why don’t you run? Back and forth, back and forth. And then we were like, well, we thought it was something curious about how a lot of the same people who have the excess capital to buy expensive art have often had the same access capital to buy expensive politicians.

 

Sama Alshaibi

It’s true.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And it’s kind of a hidden layer of that. Like both art and politics are full of wacky ideas and funny money, and we kind of wanted to bring that together and realizing that art and politics are part of a society that we wanted to forge something at the nexus of art, commerce, politics and education. And we thought that we could do that by just collaborating with people we knew on campuses and in businesses and in galleries and and artists to kind of just talk about politics.

We realized that all art is political, like doesn’t have to be you not to call it political for it to be political just by the nature of a person making something that they hope will affect another’s, that’s a political act. And so we created what we were calling the first artist-run Super PAC. Ultimately, it was technically not the first artist-run Super PAC, but we recognized that it was good branding.

We started in 2015, but we wanted to put critical discourse into political discourse to refine our thinking, thinking that what we know, what makes a great artist is critique. Unfortunately, politicians do everything they can to avoid critique, which means that growing, evolving, challenging them is very difficult because they all have to be born perfect and maintain their perfect veneer, which actually doesn’t allow any of us to grow.

And so Michelle Woo was my studio manager at the time, and it was one of those things where we kind of stopped doing that, that kind of art, quote unquote, and started doing this where we were like saying, what if we did billboards? What if we did town halls and we just started to like, go around and ask people, would you like to, you know, talk about your work in this context?

And as soon as you call it political, people think differently about it. And and so we just went to museums say, hey, to do with a town hall about art politics. And and so that led over the past decade for us to us doing about I think right now 800 billboards across the country with over 650 artists in all 50 states plus D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and doing, I think, 500 or more town halls or activations over 200 exhibition runs and really working with at least 10,000 people to just really hopefully broaden the conversation and bring nuance to political discourse.

And it’s been fun. I now they’re a nonprofit, which I’m not a formal member of, but everyone still thinks I’m in charge, which I am always like, If they would listen to me.

 

Sama Alshaibi

You told me a little about the title The Freedoms…

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah. So, we were, and I was really fascinated when we started with Norman Rockwell’s paintings of FDR’s, Norman Rockwell made a series of paintings as an attempt to kind of illustrate Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concept that everyone was entitled to For basic freedoms and his January 6^th, 1941 State of the Union address. And he said everyone was entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear and freedom of want.

And I wanted to recreate the Rockwell images which were really famous like a family eating a turkey at a table, or people from different ethnicities praying. But when I looked at these images, almost every one of these images was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, presumably. And there was like one Catholic person, and it was like a Black woman in the shadows.

In one of them and I recognized that the United States didn’t look like that then. The population, the faith and it doesn’t look like that now. So, I wanted to update those For Freedoms for the present moment and didn’t know how to do it. And so, when we were like up with ideas, Eric was like, well, what if we call it For Freedoms?

And we were like, It’s like, okay. And then he looked up www For freedoms dot com, F O U R freedoms. And it was taken he’s oh but for freedoms isn’t.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Was like we’re

 

Hank Willis Thomas

for freedoms and we’re like, okay. Because we realized in order to really be creative, we have to imagine that there are freedoms that we’re not even thinking of now. That will be things that were For in the future, and they’re probably things that we’re against now that we might even be for, and that we needed to embrace duality, complexity, and not just us but everyone, right?

And so we it was kind of I mean, let’s just take like how we did things.

 

Sama Alshaibi

That’s kind of this is a plays in sort of the way you work with language and text. It’s kind of I mean, that’s a has a very specific back story. But …

 

Hank Willis Thomas

You thought it was smarter.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah. No, I think it’s I think it’s smart still. I mean, even if we get there accidentally as art is and still smart, there’s something subconscious happening.

 

Jennifer Saracino

A serendipity. Yeah.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

The funny thing is, like, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We didn’t know what a Super PAC was. We just talked to our friend Albert Ignacio, who was also part of the foot football crew. I called him up and asked him to make a logo. He made a logo and we filed the papers for becoming a Super PAC, which is like very simple, but we didn’t really know what a Super PAC was.

And then we told one journalist that we were creating the first artist-run Super PAC, and next thing you know, it’s in the New York Times. People are writing about it and we’re like, but you can just say, put a logo and some signs and papers and all of a sudden you’re an expert on like. What are you going to do as a Super PAC, blah, blah, blah.

And our the way the collaboration really took hold, it became because it was like an art project we really thought were going to go for like two or three months and in the answering of the questions, we formulated what we were doing. So are you going to do this? You’re going to you can do exhibitions. Yeah, we’re going to do visual about working with this artist.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds like great. Yeah, we’re going to do that.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Like, that’s so.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

So much of what happened really came in response to people’s assumptions based off of what they know that we didn’t know.

 

Sama Alshaibi

So, you were having a kind of a dialog and one of those, you know, like we were actually collaborating, but collaborating with journalists and the weird questions that they brought that push truth is more interesting than fiction.

 

As a thesis, the person with the question usually is the person with the answer. And so it’s often a lot of our early work was people would say, So when we go to an institution, say, which we love to do a town hall with you, and they’re like, okay, great, where would you like to be about? We’d be like, well, what would you like it to be about?

And that from that discourse, something really exciting would come up.

 

Sama Alshaibi

You should be teaching methodologies in art practice. And just because that’s that’s brilliant. How is this creative civic engagement impacted you now?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

There’s so many ways it’s impacted me. We did some really, really cool things. We did some really amazing things in 2018, we did this 50-state initiative, which I mentioned where we started with because we weren’t going to really we were done like 2016, we did 14 billboards. We probably did like 20 town halls. And after the election we were in South Africa for one of my mother’s Black Portrait’s conferences and Wyatt came and is like, guys, we’re getting all these really weird emails.

And it turns out that after the election, people had seen a billboard that we had done called Make America Great Again with using Spider Martin’s picture from the Bloody Sunday in 1965, where on one side there’s nonviolent civil rights activists, and on the other side there are police with batons pointing at them, giving them a two minute warning to disperse and then subsequently brutalized them.

And people were like, whose side are you on? You know, is this are you encouraging police brutality or are you saying that, you know, you’re calling these cops racists and all of a sudden there was like CNN was writing about it with other periodicals. It was like all of this controversy. And they’re like, well, people like, what are you going do next?

And like, we didn’t. And but we really what was fascinating was that CNN said Mississippi residents unsure of controversial billboards intent, which really felt like a success as an artwork were. We’re like they can’t put it in a box. That’s you know and it sucks that like what does it mean to make America great again is what the question was.

And I want to I think, an exhibition at MoMA and saw some people standing outside of like a friend board member and the director and the board member say her name is Sarah Harrison, who’s now the chair of the board of MoMA. When are you going to give For Freedoms of residency? And it was like Claus was the director of the museum, and he was like, well, how about what are you doing in January?

And we’re like, I called Eric, and it was like we just got offered a residency at MoMA PS1. What are we going to do? And that was right before the inauguration of President Trump in his first term. And the builder had come down. We preserved it. We put that up in the gallery and like started to that’s when we’re like, I guess we’ll do a town hall and people are like writing stuff on Post-its and sort of put them on the wall.

And it was just like it just evolved into one of the dancers that decided to. We knew that we were like, You guys want to do something and modern dancers in the space and just put up random stuff. I do want to share this because while we were there, Peter Eley, who was the curator who kind of was assigned to us with Oliver Schultz, was talking about the history of modern art.

Alfred Barr, who was the first president of the Museum of Modern Art, who was an evangelist for modern. Modern art wasn’t a thing, but modernism was still evolving. And they it was just kind of an idea that they were trying to prove. And so, MoMA would basically say, you want to be kind of like with the coolness where, you know, they were saying like, this is modern art.

And so, if you’re in rapid City or in Lawrence, Kansas, or if you’re and Des Moines, Iowa, and you want to be seen as up with the times, you all should rent exhibitions from us and they would lease out these exhibitions to museums and galleries all over the country. And that’s why you’ll find some of the most amazing in modern art.

There’s a Jackson Pollock here and you know, and a de Kooning, I think in places where you’re like, how did that even find its way here? And it’s because these fancy New Yorkers were advocates for because if you were an industrialist or you were rich and here you wanted to be up with it, then, you know, I went to New York.

And so, we were like, wait, well, how come we don’t do that now in a way? Like when his idea was that we should be evangelists for political art and that we should think about the interstate system as our connecting routes. And so, and we just said, okay, where do we know people who work at museums or galleries?

And we realized we just made a list and there were like 80 people that we just came up with immediately. There were 35 states. We called them up, were like, would you like to do a project with us? And that led to this 50-state initiative where we did exhibitions, town halls and billboards and all 50 states for the first time.

And most of the time our only content was, do you want to do something with this? Yep.

 

Sama Alshaibi

And a logo.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And that’s what we called it, the largest creative collaboration in the country, because it was literally just like that. You know. Do you we know anybody in Hawaii. Do you know anybody Hawaii? Oh, yeah. There’s this place. And I say that because we take so much is obvious. But like, if we take it for granted that modern art is, came from Paris to New York and maybe was popular, but not someone actually came up with the scheme to make this important because once New Yorkers said it was important, other people did.

 

Sama Alshaibi

That. And so curious what there if you could put us in the room of the town halls, what were those like? And, you know, the energy, the tenor, like what sort of transpired in them.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

What we decided we were going to do the town halls around the For Freedoms. So there was a freedom of fear, freedom of worship, freedom of speech and freedom from want. And our friend Andrea Hickey, who was a curator at the Cleveland Museum, came up to us and she’s like, well, why don’t you guys do eight town halls here as a residency?

And this is like right around the same time as the MoMA PS1 thing, right? Okay. And she put us in touch with education people. And so one example, the town hall about freedom of worship that was really profound for me was Eric and Megan Reich, who was the director of education then, got on this kick about prison and doing a town hall about worship in prison.

And so they found an imam, a pastor, and they brought for the town hall in this museum, it was catered by 12 incarcerated women who were in a program with the Lutheran Church and someone who taught faith in the prison, someone who was wrongfully incarcerated, a pastor. And it was like magic, I mean, who talk, you know, that’s one thing.

Like one of the women who was working, like she felt like she needed to get grab the mic at some point and she’s like, yeah, well, I got she basically got arrested when she was nine months pregnant and she had been in jail for seven years serving a nine year term. So her child had never known her mother, their mother outside of prison and talked about she didn’t have that much experience with the things that she felt like she had learned really important lessons through her experience in prison that were going to make her a better mother.

And it’s like, you know, it was like, What? What are you talking about? Like prisons? And just and she was like, This is my life. You don’t get to tell me my story. And some people are crying. It was amazing. But like this, that kind of thing so much. And more recently, Michelle has been really leading a lot of conversation and collaboration she did for Freedom’s Congress.

And at Lachman, 300 to 500 people a few months ago. And it was really about healing and consciousness and kind of connecting with ourselves in a moment where we feel so rattled. Right. So, it evolves.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah. I was wondering if you could tell us about raise up and maybe describe the work and then thinking about six months later, I believe is when the whole Ferguson hands up kind of slogan comes into being and how titles and moments in history right wind up reframe ing your work or making maybe assumptions that people bring to the work or the way they think about it.

And, you know, whether that is an interesting serendipity or maybe it’s complex. I was also thinking about the White Woman series and also.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Unbranded a century of white women from 1915 to 2015.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right? And it’s a very specific I mean, it is a big project along a series of work that you did before that it makes complete sense, but that even the word white woman, I mean that title now white women sound so different after the whole sort of Karen phenomenon we get in social media and what it might be saying, you know, that has nothing.

I don’t think it has anything to do with it, although there might be some aspects about whiteness, right? And how that gets sold and packaged and commodified and explained and, you know, all the ideals of the power in which it’s expressed that white women can can take place. I’d like to hear about both works, but I’d also like to hear what happens in the aftermath when we change a society and how it might reframe your work and you have a problem with that.

Or do you fight against that or do you embrace it?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I do my best to embrace and not to fight in all times. I … In 2013, I made a work called Raise Up, which was in South Africa. I’d seen an image by Ernest Cole of miners being strip searched during apartheid South Africa, and there’s 13 men facing a wall with their arms waist high. And whenever I looked at the picture, I’ve always felt guilty because I was always gawking at their butts.

And it felt like it was like a weird thing to like look at a picture that you’re supposed to, like, take something from, but really just be like looking at people’s butts. And I felt awkward about that and I wanted to make a work about that and somehow I thought that I could best do that by making a recreation of the photograph in sculptural form.

And so I kind of sliced an element of of the photograph from their torsos up and turned it into a sculpture. I think with 13 bronze figures, that sculpture, each figure was then ten inches tall. So editing the part that I felt uncomfortable about and rather than naming it about the miners, I just called it Raise Up. I wanted to give it a different context or give them empowerment.

And it’s funny to think that those men who inspired the work, not only the photographer, are possibly still alive or their children are. I never thought about that. And so it made the work I did in South Africa, and that was that. And then I think I know that June 14, 19 to 2014 or something around the time was when Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, and that term, hands up, don’t shoot, became a rallying cry.

And December that year, Jack Shainman Gallery brought an edition of that work to Art Basel. And someone maybe someone on Beyonce’s team maybe posted it somewhere. And people are referring to it as the hands up, don’t shoot piece. And all of a sudden I was being asked to talk about this work, which had changed context that so I was talking about something that happened, you know, six years ago in one part of the country and another part of the world, I should say, that seemed to be speaking very eloquently to something that would be happening in the future.

And that’s when I started to really think about artists as shamans, as time travelers, that we live in a future that doesn’t yet exist. And so we can’t we can’t be too emotionally invested in any kind of response because we don’t if the artwork makes it out of our studio, it will likely have a longer life than we do.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And so it may take a lot of different forms. So does that answer that question.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah, no, it was, that was great.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

And unbranded century of white women. I have a lot of like unpopular opinions and one is that I don’t believe in race. I think it’s a divide and conquer strategy that whoever created the white race probably had it fixed for them to win. And we are all oppressed by the concept of race because it divides humanity. And a divided humanity cannot be united.

And there’s a presumption that white women have a privilege. But I think white women quote people who are labeled or label themselves white and women have always been in a vulnerable and precarious place. They were not also included as human beings and were basically considered property when this country was founded. If they had any security it was very tenuous. Always.

And a lot of the brutality that others face physically in their society they had to endure psychologically. And I was curious about that in advertising, you know, And when you start to think about look at some of these images of standards of beauty that a lot like, I would never perhaps have been, neither you would never assume that you could fit fully into this standard of beauty that many white women feel like they have to in order to be enough.

And the confinements of that and how it changes over time was something I was really fascinated by. So I wanted to track that in advertising over the course of a century and saw this amazing kind of evolution of this notion of femininity, this notion of whiteness that became more and more complex until the 20th 21st century.

 

Sama Alshaibi

The work that preceded that, we had some of those works at the way am I right now, the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Those was those taken from Ebony Jet magazine.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

That that was called Unbranded Reflections in Black Corporate America from 1968 to 2008. And a lot of those basically in the later part of the civil rights movement was the first time that Black people became seen as worthy citizens, which really should be called worthy consumers. And so the way that advertising started to represent people with browner tones of skin was very different.

And I thought I should just track that. And I chose 1968 because was the symbolic end of the civil rights movement. This was in 2005. And I just said, you know, 40 years sounds like a good number, not knowing that the weeks that I first presented at the Rubell Family Collection in December 28, just a few weeks after Barack Obama had been elected president in 2005, nobody knew who Barack Hussein Obama was.

And again, there was a moment when something that was just being made. And so in this series, I took in that case two ads for every year and removed all the advertising information. And so once you remove the logos and the copy, you start to see the image. And it’s usually pretty curious.

 

 

Sama Alshaibi

There’s some really beautiful images that I was. Did you learn much about the photographers of that era that hard to sort of decipher?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

They didn’t know on aren’t normally credit.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right. Not an advertisement but but also.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

But Todd Gray is there’s a jungle fever poster that’s said under the artist named Todd Gray who I’ve known for a long time. One time I was talking to him, and he was like, so yeah, you used my picture for that project. Which picture? And he was like that one, Oh.

 

Sama Alshaibi

That’s amazing. So I believe I heard you say once that when you take the advertising information and all the text information out, you don’t even like the images, don’t really relate to what they’re selling. You don’t even know what they’re selling right. You didn’t elaborate a little bit more on that?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Once removed. Yeah, advertising is never really about the product. It’s about what ideas and generalizations you can get people to buy into through the manipulation with the text and the seduction of the imagery. And when you remove it, you realize that what’s really for sale is the assumption of a value of a certain type of an identity. And when we market to a specific, quote unquote demographic, we have to bring prejudice.

We’re like, okay, these kind of people care about this kind of stuff, so we’re going to talk to this kind of way. And I love seeing that prejudice revealed because if I can understand it, that really reveals my own prejudice.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Right? And I think what I was really when I saw that work, actually, I think it was at the collection, came to the Tucson Museum of Art and.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

The Americans. Yeah.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah. So I saw a huge number of those images. And what I was always thinking, I took my class to there, we studied it together and talked about it together. But what I was really curious about was because these are advertisements, right? And some of these, if there were magazines such as Ebony and Jet, those are Black-owned magazines, but the advertisers are selling products that maybe they’re selling to both Black and white audiences, right?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Does the phrase “You’ve come a long way, baby” mean anything to you?

 

Sama Alshaibi

I know it, but I can’t place it.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Virginia Slims.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Oh yeah. I’m your age. Or maybe a few years older than you. So I remember it just too young.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

You don’t remember cigarette ads probably.

 

Sama Alshaibi

The camel ones, I remember those, the camel cartoons. Yeah.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

But what about the Marlboro Man?

 

Sama Alshaibi

I only know that through studying the history of advertising. I don’t think I grew up seeing it.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Well, what was fascinating … If you like the way they sold cigarettes to presumably white men was with rugged hardcore doing rough stuff, the same product being advertised to women of various ethnicities. It was about progress and elegance and being forward. You know, that’s you’ve come a long way, baby, you know. And then there Newport cigarettes which were marketed often to African-Americans. The ads would say Alive with Pleasure.

And so, it’s like Black people are just having a great time. And sometimes without cigarettes at all in the ad. And so, it was really fascinating to see how one product can, you know, like it. What does it say about the product really, that you can It’s the same thing. It’s put a different picture, a different name on it, and you talk to a different audience in a different way.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Do you think you’ll ever pick it up again?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I would like to, but advertising has changed so much since then, right? Like print ads are not the dominant form of advertising anymore. While it’s still popular, it’s become so much more insidious because rather than corporations creating images to sell products, they’ve figured out how to convince us to sell ourselves so that they can sell products to us.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah, that’s. Well, I think that really takes us to the AI question that we’ve all been interested in asking you about, you know, how AI functions with proliferation of images that exist on the net and whether they’re from artists or they’re from Instagram or whether however they’ve come to be. And you, are you curious about using the technologies since you have worked with a huge swath of like popular media and images and archives, Is this something that you find fascinating, or do you find it problematic?

I know even finding something problematic might be interesting as an artist, right?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yeah, well, I’ve done things with AI imaging. What I feel like an ancient person, but I feel a little bit heartbroken. Not because of AI, but because of what the advent of AI image generation means for the archives. Like, the truth, there is never truth in photography, but the truth of a documented image means nothing anymore.

Because there can now be images made that 95% of people will presume were authentic from a certain period. They’re completely fabricated. And so what’s the use of using a quote unquote real image from that? Like, what’s the currency of that? Like, imagine what an image can make of Bob Marley. And maybe if with a savvy outlet, recreate the whole story of who he is and what he was about and what they expand of Martin Luther King, I’m like, what is going to happen to the history that we know in images when virtually anyone can create an image that appears authentic?

I mean, sorry, it’s just crazy. Like there was a thing that was like trending on social media about of Malcolm X talking about racial justice, about violence, like listening to it and I was like, this does not sound like Malcolm X. This sounds way too woke and not in a good way, but, you know, like, it’s just like, it’s like something just sounds off because Malcolm X was not trying to be friendly and he wasn’t trying to go.

I think he was trying to like he wasn’t pleading for someone to care about, you know, us as people like. And so I looked at like and I looked it up and as like he never said, but also like there was no no one would ever like me. I know. Because, like, I’ve listened to his speeches, I, you know, I’m familiar with the tenor of his way of speaking, but no one else would know that.

And that co-option of such a powerful and piercing orator into like a 2020s social justice lens to me was heartbreaking. Not because I don’t support the values, but because it steals the authenticity and the power of what he was saying. You know, because someone’s like, My voice doesn’t matter. I’m going to use someone else’s voice just to push my agenda.

Who would never say that. Anyway I’m that. So so I mean, I’m I think it is cool, but I’m scared.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah, I, I’m a little freaked out, too. Yeah, well, I think of the differences. You know, your work is, you know, your appropriating images re-contextualizing whereas I the as you’re talking about is fabrication, right? There’s an erasure of authenticity, which is terrifying.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Which photography has always been, has never been an authentic moment of captured photography because it’s only a split second of time and narrow angle of you. Where to dimensions. There’s no smell. So I always know that photography is fake, and so I don’t mourn that. I just am concerned about how people can be used in very much more insidious ways than ever before.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Did you ever probably know that? That’s kind of … Yeah. The current conflict about artists protesting that there’s going to be a big auction of AI work and because the work is being the AI work is coming from artist’s own projects. Right. And without authorship or without any attribution and someone that works with appropriated material, how do you does that have a concern for you or do you feel like there’s too much control and power that artists try to exercise over their work anyway?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I think there’s multiple sides of it. I think artists are always going to be exploited and the .0001 percent of us that can make a living of it are just lucky, not not more talented or more deserving than anyone else. I had my mom bragging for me like I’m a I’m a nepo baby, but I think I come from a culture, a generation that kind of created the remix right.

Like the music that I became most most familiar with wasn’t music that was the original music. It was uncredited. Re application of a certain sound to a new agenda. And that’s basically what’s happening.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yes. It’s hip hop.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

You know, and but what happened in 1994 is that hip hop got corporatized and stopped being hip hop, right? So, I think 30 years later, we’re going to see that with visual image images, you know, it’ll be a shadow of its former self, but perhaps still useful.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Fascinating thinking about this idea of change and evolution. I actually want to go back to something that you were talking about earlier. The curriculum at the California College of the Arts and Crafts. Was there any sort of craft practices that were being taught And I’m asking you this because I want to ask a question about the quilt making that you’ve been getting into recently and your work on quilts.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Yes there definitely was a fabric department. There is a ceramics department. There was a jewelry making department. I took classes in none of those. I was mostly in the darkroom and then doing visual critical studies things. But the spirit of the arts and crafts movement was very, very much alive. And but my photographer, my professors Jim Goldberg, and Larry Salton, two of my professors, along with Chris, were really instrumental for me because they were challenging the conventions of photography.

I’m talking about personal life, talking about bringing Texans of images and using archives. That was really exciting to me and that influenced me. The quilts were really just a few minutes ago, I came to I went to the archives at CCP and one of my mother’s quilts is in the collection as a quilt with photographs sewn into it.

And it’s called Daddy’s Ties, and it’s my grandfather’s ties and some of his pins from his lifetime that my mother, after he died with some of my aunts, sew together to make these these quilts. And so just I just got to touch my grandfather’s. I mean, they let me talk. They said they didn’t see me touch it, but they let me touch my grandfather’s ties.

 

Sama Alshaibi

And that’s the Center for Creative Photography. The CCP, which acquired this work in your mom. Do you know what year?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

1992, two years after my grandfather died or. I don’t know. That’s what it says. But. So family history, Legacy. Yeah.

 

Sama Alshaibi

And now your work is across the way. The quilts, you know, it’s got a strong tradition. And in African-American culture, it’s got narratives and stories in it, yet it’s full of symbology and the flags, also the memorial to your cousin. And I think you could tell us a little bit about your cousin because it’s such a major impact on you and your work and then thinking about memorials and memorialization.

And I think about the quilting especially I’m thinking about the big AIDS memorial Quilt project that really is a kind of counter memorial to subjects that people didn’t really want to be talking about and about deaths, the victims that were being erased and not being seen in our news and by our politicians. And that really gave voice to their loss, commemorating their lives.

And were thinking about that when you were making your works?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I was thinking about the AIDS quilt when I part of my genesis to For Freedoms and Question Bridge and everything I think about Act up in Grand Fury. When I got into branding and advertising because they were some of the most effective artists kind of appropriating popular culture, language and advertising to talk about human rights through the form of gay liberation and health care, through the activism for in the fight against AIDS.

So the quilts themselves were definitely more connected to my grandmother, Kippy Stroud, who founded the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, kind of was one of the first people got into my work. And that’s kind of how I became interested in making quilts, not thinking. Again, I always thought I was original, so I didn’t think about my mom’s quilts.

Then, oh, maybe I’ll make a quilt. My cousin sometimes. Well, this was my best friend, big brother figure, and he was murdered on February 2nd, 2000 in Philadelphia when he was visiting my grandmother. And my life plan up until then had been really just to follow in his footsteps because he was a person who was good at everything.

And that narrative I the person who was the opposite of that. But he always looked out for me and really kind of nurtured me and cared for me, even though a lot of other people thought I was not, I was not noticeable. And all of a sudden I was kind of pushed to the forefront in my our family dynamic because we were only boys in our kind of collective of cousins.

And I felt like I needed to carry on his legacy and honor him and his kind of I mean, he was smooth and kind of gregarious and easygoing and cool and fun and good looking and tall, good at sports. I’m not going to say anything about me, but let’s just say what I could do. But I say arguably as well as him was love people and express that and show it.

I don’t think that as eloquently as he did, but his one of the things that he, a friend of his gave me recording after he died of him, like singing on a microphone, just playing around. And it said one of the last things on that recording is love of rules, him saying that. And that became kind of my motto, my mantra, and something that I am often compelled to put into art form and public space and hopefully in people’s hearts and minds.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah, I saw the project, the Gun Violence Memorial, I mean.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

The Gun Violence Memorial Project.

 

Sama Alshaibi

I got that one right. I was like one of the most moving experiences I ever had. And I actually took photos and sent it to your mom. It must be really hard to. I mean, I know it’s your you’re holding him in your heart. You’re doing all this work, but you’re always having to share him with the public that doesn’t know him.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Is that is that does that feel good or does it feel hard some time that you’re? Does it keep …

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I felt exploitative for the first, let’s say, 5 to 10 years. Like most, a lot of what I was doing was based up with commodifying my own family’s pain, but not necessarily commercially, but like I was very aware of that, that relationship to like my cousin’s murderer and slave to my books or pictures of him or my aunts mourning that that was weird.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Or was it a watch or a necklace of his that was?

 

Hank Willis Thomas

Someone robbed him for nothing. Actually, they robbed some other people that he was with for their necklaces. Yeah, but they didn’t. Those guys ran away and my cousin had nothing of value on him, so they just shot him in the back of the head. Made him less the face down then shot him in the back of the head. But now I I think about how many people have been shot and killed in this country since Songha was killed, which is over a million.

I mean, I mourn for all those people, all the family members, and see myself as just, you know, a drop in the in the ocean of people who’ve lost shed tears to people who have lost their lives to gun violence in the United States. But that’s just within the imaginary borders of this nation. Right. But if you go south of this border to to Mexico or go to Brazil, you know, these numbers are also heartbreaking.

So I just see myself as being every time I get to say his name, I hope I know my his mother, my aunt Lesley just she gets to remember, I mean, he’s somebody that’s worthy of remembering. And like, even his, the anniversary was just not too long ago. And his high school roommate, they were in boarding school just wrote me.

And, you know, his memory is still very much alive. And those of us who are still living and it’s fun to reflect on that.

 

Sama Alshaibi

Yeah, I understand why you use the word the commodifing of your family’s pain, but I think I also think you’re honoring the fact that that pain exists and, you know, someone also lost someone close to me. I, I really, I really was very moved. So. So thank you for that work and thank you for sharing it. And I think we’ll leave it there.

Thank you so much for visiting us in the studio and coming down to the southwest, to Tucson. And we hope you take your kids out to the Desert Museum tomorrow and like to have you back anytime time.

 

Hank Willis Thomas

I hope to be back. Thank you for having me.

 

Amelia (Amy) Kraehe

Thank you for joining Race Remix today. This episode is made possible through the generous donations of our sponsors and the efforts of our team of students, staff, faculty and community partners. If you enjoyed this conversation, listen to more episodes at Race Remix Arts dot Arizona dot Edu.