Exhibition Review: Hank Willis Thomas, ‘All Things Being Equal’, Portland Art Museum, 2020
Published at: Ibuki.Art
Upon entering the outdoor entrance of the Portland Art Museum, which hosted Hank Willis Thomas' first career retrospective, you are greeted by a large neon sign that blinks “LOVE” and “RULES” over the front door. Inside in the lobby is an eight-foot-tall afro pick that morphs into the iconic black power fist, which foregrounds a red wall presenting the title of the show “All Things Being Equal…” It’s a bold introduction to an artist who has never shied away from boldness and is a brief glimpse of someone that has continually experimented with how to make art that can speak to our times while also being timeless.
Inside the two-story atrium are a circle of 28-foot blue fabric banners falling from the rafters, each sewn with white stars to resemble the American flag. Titled, simply, “14,719” each star represents a life lost to gun violence in 2018. Commissioned specifically for this show, it transforms the space into a sobering and sacred place of remembrance and is also emblematic of Thomas’s impulse towards scale.
A conceptual artist that works across different mediums, the show contains over 90 pieces of photography, prints, sculptures, video, and installations. While the breadth of the forms used is broad, there is a conceptual focus to all of his works exploring how power is expressed through visual systems, and in turn how these visual systems play a part in shaping our world.
Some of his earliest works, Branded, were made shortly after he graduated with an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2004, in which photographs are manipulated to show, for instance, a block body scarred with the Nike logo. In others, he places athletes in different contexts of oppression, such as a football player lined up against a cotton picker, or basketball players attempting to make a layup into a noose. The work is slick and sophisticated - it could be mistaken for an advertisement in a glossy magazine spread or billboard - but the substance of it makes it subversive.
It’s also a useful introduction to a key throughline to his work - the ways bodies, specifically black bodies, are commoditized and rendered transactional. In the next room, we are introduced to one of the defining moments of the artists’ life - the death of his first cousin Songha at the hands of a gunman - through a stop-motion video using GI Joes made with long-time friend collaborator Kambui Olujimi. Through the use of the classic children’s toy, it reinforces the reality that in America black boys do not get to be boys. Next to this video installation is another in the Branded series, a photograph of African-American family members at a funeral, but presented as a Mastercard “Priceless” advertisement. The overlaid text reads
3-piece suit: $250new socks: $2gold chain: $4009mm pistol: $79,bullet:.¢60Picking the perfect casket for your son:Priceless.There is a specific skill that Thomas has, one that I suspect was cultivated by his mother, the influential curator, and critic Beverly Willis, and the hours he must have spent at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It’s his ability to mine personal experiences of the world, such as grief and joy, to highlight and critique systems of exploitation and violence, but in a way that extends that story to others in a deeply generous and empathetic way.
In a discussion at the museum for its opening, the artist says that “My anger won’t save me,” the artist says in a discussion at the museum “the only thing that has is my love.”
Across the Unbranded series, Thomas acts as an archivist, digging through decades of advertising that depict black families and people in different ways, while removing all the ad copy to strip it of its concept. The photographed body becomes the product, and the power of visual culture is put under the spotlight. How we make and circulate images either reinforces or challenges the assumptions about black families and white women, and these turn into cultural assumptions that are often left undiagnosed. Walking through all of these images, some humorous, some unsettling, I was reminded by a sentiment of Einstein, that “we study.. history so that we may know our generational biases.”
By creating this new archive, it beckons the question of who gets to decide what is preserved as history, and the stories that exist behind those images. There is a significant power in being able to operate the tools of cultural memory and cultural erasure. “History” is often finessed to serve certain purposes, as we’ve seen time and time again in nationalist movements when a “better past” as opposed to looking forward to a better future.
This is not to say that all of his work takes a serious tone, as he often is driven by ideas and how to give form to them. In one large piece titled “Guernica,” he recreates Picasso’s famous painting as a textile collage with cut-up and sewn basketball jersey. It’s one of his biggest and most colorful works and is a beautiful thing to stare at. It’s never entirely what it seems though, as the original masterpiece was Picasso’s attempt to express the disjointed experience of the WW2 bombing of Guernica. In this particular context, and recalling his earlier works with Branded, it becomes a deeper rumination on how sports serve as a proxy for war in global politics.
Equally at ease with pop culture figures such as Jilllionaire, Swizz Beats, and Questlove as he is in the most rarefied of art spaces, Thomas has the ability to draw from the visual history of black culture, sports, music and politics and present them in ways that are accessible to anybody. It’s this skill that has helped him in his turn towards public art and sculpture. You see some glimpses of this in his retrospective, particularly the bronze and steel sculptures and retroreflective pieces that grapple with how art and image-making is used in the creation of historical artifacts, and then referenced for political and cultural purposes. One such sculpture, Raise Up, depicts a row of nude black males facing a wall, with their arms above their heads. Showing only the heads and raised arms creates a sense of weightlessness. It’s an interpretation of an Ernest Cole photograph from apartheid-era South Africa, in which young black youth were submitting to medical exams in order to work in the mines. It was made in 2014 right around the same time the Ferguson unrest began, when activists were raising their arms in protest chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” and it quickly became the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” sculpture. A large-scale version of this now sits, permanently, on the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
This turn towards public sculpture is, in my view, a natural extension of his earlier Branded and Unbranded work. But, instead of working as an archivist he has become a public historian that works in the form of memorials. His partnerships with architecture firms and cities has allowed him to choose what aspects of history get preserved, as we see both in his upcoming work the Embrace and The Writing on the Wall. The Embrace will be a 22-foot sculpture inspired by images of Martin and Coretta King in embrace and be sited on a public plaza in Boston, while The Writing on the Wall is a mobile, immersive installation composed of written and drawn ephemera collected from prisoners around the world, casting a human light on the effects of mass incarceration.
In many conversations with the artist, I often would hear him say “All art is political,” which on the surface seems like a given. But there is a larger excavation at work here. It’s one thing to capture protest images and make a statement with art, but to truly understand power and politics one has to think about how things are connected and understand how systems are always in motion. The task that Thomas has taken upon himself is to expose how visual systems shape how we see the world and shape how we see ourselves in relationship to history. Where are we at a certain point of time? What histories do we choose to place ourselves in? Where do we go from here?
Apart from his sculptural and installation work happening in the public sphere, more recently he has been experimenting with retro reflective photographic screenprints with two series called Punctum and Retroreflective. He manipulates famous protest images, obscuring or isolating key elements of the composition, which can only be seen when a light is shone on it. Participants are asked to take flash photos with their phones, and the resulting image that is captured reveals the punctum, a concept from Roland Barthes of “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” It’s quite a brilliant tact, forcing the viewer to interact with how images are used to craft a sense of personal and collective narrative, and how there is always a deeper and more complex story behind these images.
“The most important thing is a human” is a line that the artist often uses, recalling James Baldwin, that to be human is quite a powerful and fragile thing. In his grief for his murdered cousin Songha, Thomas explores the ways black bodies are devalued and commodified, how violence is a persistent reality in our world, and how power shapes the images we use to define how we see ourselves together, and how human this tragedy is.
Back downstairs at the “14,719” installation I had a chance to reflect on what the exhibition. As I placed around these banners of fallen stars, I found myself wanting to know the lives of each of the people marked by these banners, while grappling with my many complicities in upholding and aiding white supremacy and the violence that necessitates. What music did these people listen to, who was their favorite musician, did they like to sleep with the lights on or off, what fears did they carry with them, had they ever held a gun before?
In the slim and overlapping relationship between archive and memorial, there is a fraught political dynamic at play of who we choose to remember and memorialize. But by holding the human at the core of this and by giving form to his personal experiences and those of others, Thomas generously and empathetically brings us into this story, posing the question if “All Things Being Equal…” what do we do now?