Hank Willis Thomas (born 1976) is an American conceptual artist. Based in Brooklyn, New York, he works primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.
Early life and education Hank Willis Thomas was born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey to Hank Thomas, a jazz musician, and Deborah Willis, artist, photographer, curator and educator.The HistoryMakers. Deborah Willis biography, ArtMakers, June 27, 2007. Accessed August 1, 2009. Thomas attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts as a Museum Studies student.
Thomas holds a B.F.A. in Photography and Africana studies from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts (2004). In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. In 2024, CCA alum Thomas received an honorary doctorate from the California College of the Arts alongside Deb Willis. In 2025, Thomas received an Honorary Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and completed the Owner/President Management program at Harvard Business School.
Career
His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; and, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. In 2012, Question Bridge: Black Males debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected for the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute. Thomas is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium. Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Hank Willis Thomas' collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco.
Thomas explores the representation of the African-American male body in visual culture in his B(r)anded Series.Dutra, Robyn. "The New Regime: Hank Willis Thomas." Black Book, December 4, 2008. Accessed August 4, 2009.Davis, Beandrea. "The Elusive Concept of Blackness." ColorLines, November/December 2007. Accessed August 4, 2009. Writing in The Guardian, critic Arwa Mahdawi observed: "Thomas's work 'unbrands' advertising: stripping away the commercial context, and leaving the exposed image to speak for itself."Mahdawi, Arwa. "The truth about adverts: selling the White Woman™", The Guardian, April 29, 2015 His two screenprints of 2013, And I Can't Run and Blow the Man Down, express the erasure of past injustices to the black male body by printing photographs of humiliations or executions of black men on retro-reflective vinyl (commonly used for street signs), rendering them invisible except under flash photography.Erdos, Elleree. "Hank Willis Thomas: Now You See It, Now You Don't," Art in Print Vol. 4 No. 2 (July–August 2014). For this work in the broader context of UV-reflective media and black radicalism, see Ensminger, David. "Black Light Panthers: The Politics of Fluorescence," Art in Print Vol. 5 No. 2 (July–August 2015).
Thomas has a permanent installation at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The piece, titled Rise Up, depicts a cement wall with statues of black heads and bodies emerging from the top of the wall whose arms are raised in surrender. The piece comments on the incidents of police violence and police brutality that are prevalent in current American society.
In 2017, Thomas also unveiled his permanent public artwork Love Over Rules in San Francisco and All Power to All People in Opa Locka, Florida.
Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the MFA programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
Thomas is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November, 2008). His work has been featured in other publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000), and the exhibitions along with accompanying publications 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003), and 30 Americans (RFC, 2008). Other major publications include Aperature'''s Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal... (2018), and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC)'s The Philly Block Project (2017).
Thomas' first comprehensive survey Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal... opened at the Portland Art Museum in fall 2019 and will travel to additional U.S. museums in 2020. The exhibition will highlight Thomas' devotion to reframing perspectives on difficult issues central to American history and the representation of race and the politics of visual culture.
In January 2023, his sculpture "The Embrace" was unveiled in the 1965 Freedom Plaza on the Common in Boston, Massachusetts. The 20 foot high bronze sculpture honors Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King and depicts their arms embracing. The artwork was inspired by a black and white photo of the couple sharing an embrace after Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. On September 13, 2023, Thomas was one of the five recipients of the 2023 Medal of Arts, a prestigious accolade created by the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program and awarded to him by Jill Biden.
Collaborative projects
For Freedoms
Founded in 2016 along with artist Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms is an anti-partisan platform for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action. The name was 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. Through exhibitions, installations, and public programs, the organization is established to deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values, and to advocate for equality, dialogue, and civic participation.
In 2018, For Freedoms launched the 50 State Initiative, the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history. In the fall of 2018, For Freedoms launched a major billboard campaign in every state, including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The campaign included over 150 contemporary artists, including Marilyn Minter, Rashid Johnson, Guerrilla Girls, and Theaster Gates, among others.
In October 2018, For Freedoms also launched a photo campaign entitled Four Freedoms. In collaboration with photographers Emily Shur and Wyatt Gallery, Thomas and For Freedoms transformed Norman Rockwell's depictions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 address to Congress, which articulated FDR's vision of the four basic human freedoms. Thomas wrote that "The image haunted me because of the world we live in. I wanted to imagine what it would look like today." Through dozens of iterations of Rockwell's original four paintings, the 82 images in the campaign attempted to reflect the immeasurable diversity of American identities today. Celebrities such as Rosario Dawson, Dolores Huerta, Gina Belafonte, Van Jones, Jesse Williams, Robert A. Nakamura and Karen L. Ishizuka, Kiran Gandhi, Michael Ealy, Saul Williams, Rodney Barnette, and others were included in the reinterpretations. The new version of the images were widely shared on social media and Instagram, including by celebrities such as Alicia Keys and Jada Pinkett-Smith.
The Writing On The Wall
Together with American academic, cultural critic and activist Baz Dreisinger, Thomas and Dreisinger's organization, Incarceration Nations Network, have collaborated to create the traveling exhibition and installation, The Writing On The Wall (TWOTW), constructed from over 2,000 pages of writing and art by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people across the world. TWOTW was first displayed on New York City's High Line in November, 2019, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the collaborators have adapted the content to be projected onto city buildings and landscapes, including jails and courthouses – first in New York, then in Washington, D.C., and Ohio. The installation's first international showing was in Mexico City in late June.
Cause Collective The Cause Collective is a team of artists, designers and ethnographers creating innovative art in the public realm. Their projects explore and enliven public spaces by creating a dynamic conversation between issues, sites and the public audience. By exploring ideas that affect and shape society, the collective seeks to add the "public" back into public space and art.
The Long March The Long March is a 27 monitor installation commissioned by the recently renovated Birmingham Shuttlesworth International Airport. The installation incorporates depictions of movement, migration and marching from different eras in Alabama history, for instance, the Civil War, the Children's March, the Selma Marches, football marching bands, the railroad, and migrations to the “Magic City.” The long row of monitors (the long march) track to the center of the wall and meld into a kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope is tiled in the shape of a Camellia—the Alabama state flower. The Camellia, in this instance, is a repository of past and present motion that represents the flowering that grows out of movement. The kaleidoscopic mixes and melds the long march footage creating new emergent patterns, forms and colors. The travelers who will encounter the piece will be able to envision themselves as part of this mosaic that is symbolized through Alabama's relationship to ‘the march’ as a form of historical progression.
In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth)
Thomas is working on the long-term and global public art project In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth). Also known as "The Truth Booth" it is in collaboration with Ryan Alexiev, Jim Ricks, and Will Sylvester, all members of Cause Collective, a team of artists, designers, and ethnographers creating innovative art in the public realm. The New York Times writes: "The “Truth Booth,” [is] a roving, inflatable creation by a group of artists calling itself the Cause Collective. The booth, in the shape of a cartoon word bubble with “TRUTH” in bold letters on its side, serves as a video confessional. Visitors are asked to sit inside and finish the politically and metaphysically loaded sentence that begins, “The truth is ...”".Randy Kennedy. Political Art in a Fractious Election Year "The New York Times", July 17, 2016 To date, the project has travelled Ireland, Afghanistan, South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Mexico. It embarked on a world tour at the Galway Arts Festival, Ireland in 2011. It debuted in the US during the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Virginia in June 2012.