Hank Willis Thomas

Quinn: Hello, welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I’m Quinn Rose, and I am someone who did not go to art school, but I love to learn about new artists.

Betty: Hi, and I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I have been working as a gallery guide at an art gallery for the past eight years where I also get to learn about lots of new artists, but I also do that on the internet.

Quinn: So today we are doing a little dive into the artist Hank Willis Thomas. And in the past, when we've done dives into artists, we've mostly focused on their biography and kind of how their work stems out of specific things in their biography. But with Thomas, this is actually going to be a little bit different partially because the man’s like 45. Like he is, he does not have a full biography yet. He is out here just making a lot of work. And, and so a lot of the info out there is really not about his life itself, it’s about the work that he is creating and what he's trying to say through his art. So we're going to be really focusing in on a few of his different projects today. To give you a little bit of basic background about him, he got a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from NYU, and he also has an MFA in photography and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. So a very well-educated person in lots of different arts as well as sort of critical studies of different kinds. And he has taken all of those and become this incredible multidisciplinary artist who works in a lot of different mediums, all sort of centered around the idea of changing the context of what we're looking at. A quote from him is “whoever's holding the frame gets to create the context.” And he believes that the role of the artist in society is to highlight the things that we'd rather ignore. And so he's always looking at things like race, gender, class, and how we perceive those and how we can—he can change our perception of those through his work.

Betty: Yeah. It's interesting, I first heard about Hank Willis Thomas in kind of a, I would say a bit of a weird way. So there's this photography prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I work, that ran for 10 years from 2007 to 2017, called the AGO photography prize. So it's actually a people's choice award. So the nominees are from, you know, are the gallery and, you know, lots of people like kind of like on the board of this prize, but every year they nominate four—I’m going to use the word photographers, but I'll explain that in a second. And then people, anybody who visits the AGO, people in Toronto, anybody who goes to the AGO website during this time get to vote on their favorite artists based on the works that are submitted into this show. And usually the artists that are nominated are like contemporary photographers who are still alive and working. It's not like photography for of all time. And in 2017, there were four artists who are nominated and Hank Willis Thomas was one of them. Now, Hank Willis Thomas does do photography along with a lot of other types of works, as you mentioned, but the works that were submitted to this particular show were almost all sculptures. And so it was really weird. Especially when you walk into the show and it get introduced to the artists, everybody has pictures and you just see like a bunch of sculptures and you're like, did somebody install the wrong artwork? Like is this supposed to be here? But of course you see his name and you're supposed to vote on him. The AGO photography prize after a few years of just submitting photographs did have a history of including artists who did works that weren’t just still images. In past years there were artists who submit, who had video art and art that were moving images. And you could say that kind of counts cause it's a lot of photos.

Quinn: Yeah, it’s just a lot of pictures next to each other.

Betty: Yeah it’s just pictures, you see 24 of them every second and it goes, yeah, it's just lots of pictures, but a sculpture is a bit of a stretch. So the particular works that were in this show, were basically he, so as you mentioned, Hank Willis Thomas, he’s kind of really big in remix culture. He takes previous works and kind of introduces it in a new way. So the work that really caught my attention was this piece called raise up. R-A-I-S-E raise not rise up. It's a sculpture that's made of bronze and cement and it's based, it's based on a photograph by Ernest Cole and the photo, the photograph originally was 13 South African miners who are undergoing a medical examination completely nude. So Hank Willis Thomas has recreated these 13 miners standing in a row with their hands raised up, but he has kind of cast them into a block of concrete. So it cuts off around their like nose or chin. And like, you don't see the rest of their naked bodies, just see the tops of their heads in their hands raised up. So there's multiple versions of this particular sculpture. One of them is displayed on the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. And that's a site that's dedicated to the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration in the U.S. So when I saw this work, like I just, it, I mean, it was really interesting, but also, you know, I only really realized why it was in a photography show after I realized the backstory of that it's based on a photograph. And yeah, there's a lot of different interpretations that you could have of this particular piece. Obviously the original photograph, it was, you know, Africans, South Africans going through a really humiliating medical examination in the nude. But of course, you know, there's lots of other connotations, the hands raising up by a group of black men could invoke when you see it.

Quinn: Yeah. This is a real striking piece and I haven't seen this in person, I've only seen a photograph of this version of a photograph, but it is really interesting to see how he has taken something that was from an image and sort of transcended it into this different form. And there's so much about this, like the choice to cut them off like around sort of the neck level. So it removed their bodies and I feel like there's multiple levels of that—cause it’s like on one hand, it's removed like this really humiliating aspect to this horrendous thing that they were subjected to. But on the other hand, like it has separated them from their bodies. And so what does it mean, like, to be totally like physically disconnected from the rest of your body? And of course, like having their hands up like—“hands up don't shoot” has become a rallying cry in the Black Lives Matter movement as being the last words of some Black men who were killed by police. And so the image of people raising their hands up into the air has been used both to draw attention to like horrific injustices, but also to sort of reclaim that image as power for themselves. And this piece was unveiled in 2014, which is actually like, right sort of at the beginning of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement emerging. I don't know if this piece was directly supposed to invoke that or if this is just the salient image that repeats itself time and time again. But there are definitely a lot of interpretations here and a lot of connections that can be drawn to different events.

Betty: Yeah. Actually when I first saw this piece and walked into the gallery, the way it was displayed is you approach it from their backs. So all you see is the backs of their heads and the backs of their arms and hands. And they look obviously really anonymous and you don't see their faces until you walk around intentionally to the other side. And yeah, like you said, there's a duality with this sculpture. On the one hand you can see it as like, you know, representing subjugation and submission, but then in another sense, the way it's posed, you know, you could also see it as like hands raising in terms of victory. Like civil rights and social protest was definitely Thomas's inspiration, of course. But I think like, I think he probably intends you to see multiple messages from, from this work.

Quinn: Yeah, absolutely.

Betty: And so when the other work that was in this show was similar to this. So it's a work called The Passbook Must Burn from 2013. It's made of bronze and copper and it's seven life-sized casts of arms holding passports. But what you see is like the passports are kind of a little bit messed up. Pages are flying all over the place. They look like they've been burned, obviously it’s bronze, so it looks all black and charred. And then the, on the ground, there's also copper and bronze pieces that look like pages that have been burned. So this particular sculpture it represents, or it's supposed to be also a recreation of a video, I believe, that was taken in South Africa in, I think it was the sixties. So in South Africa they had, for much of the 20th century, they had these passbook laws, which were pretty much, actually, it dates back to even before the 20th century. But it's mostly to, you know, segregate the population and manage, you know, migrant labor and things like that. But it's mostly to limit the movement of Black African, South African citizens. Starting I think in the 1940s, all Black people over the age of 16 were required to carry these passes. If you were caught without one, it's technically illegal and you could probably go to jail, and also no Black person were allowed to stay in urban areas for more than 72 hours. And these passbooks were a way for law enforcement to enforce that. And so in the sixties, there were a bunch of protests where people just literally took the passbooks and burned them and were just kind of like, you know, we shouldn't have to carry this around, basically. And it's like an, it's an act of defiance. And now I tried to look up who took the video, or maybe we don't know, maybe it's a protest video that just circulated and we're not sure exactly who made the video, but—or maybe I just couldn't find it myself, but basically this video footage is enough her inspiration for Henkel as Thomas. So, you know, since the photography prize accepted videos, now a sculpture of a video technically counts as photography, I guess. I should say that Hank Willis Thomas ended up winning this year, 2017’s photography prize. So it wasn't just, you know, a bunch of weird judges, like who, who are trying to deem this as photography, like the Toronto and Canadian and whoever voted on this, the masses actually also agreed that he should win this year's prize.

Quinn: That's great. And about this piece as well, like for both this and Raise Up, these both come from this concept called a punctum, which is basically the compelling detail of a picture. And by sort of signifying out like just the raised hands and backs of heads, or like just here with the arms burning the passbook, like that's the punctum of the image and that's what he's chosen to cast into sculptures. And for both of these, it's a way to draw attention to a very specific kind of thing. Both removing some of the personal aspects of it, like removing the faces or like most of the bodies, but at the same time, like drawing your attention to a very particular, either subjugation or rebellion and how those are in relationship to each other and how those look different when you remove them from their context and put them into new contexts, like for example, in an art museum and like, having these incredibly dangerous moments, then be immortalized in what is considered like some of the highest echelon of like fine society. And I think even beyond the nuances of each piece, which we could of course, like take an hour to talk about every single one of these, but, even the choice to take them at all and put them into museums and put them on display for the general public is a way of like turning a lot of people's eyes towards something who wouldn't necessarily have seen it or thought about it before, and also taking these sort of like tiny snippets of images and tiny snippets of people and saying like, look at what is happening here. This is worthy and important.

Betty: Yeah. And I think it's important to point out that like, a lot of these works like Raise Up and the Passbook, even though it's, they're depicting these negative aspects of history. I do think that it's important that like, I think Hank Willis Thomas does want to highlight the act of defiance and like rising up and, you know, being able to have your own agency. And it's not just about, you know, oh look at these terrible things that have been done to Black people, but also how Black people themselves are taking their own agency and, you know, literally like rising up above not just these situations, but like, you know, entire history of injustices.

Quinn: Yes. There's a ton of Thomas' work that maybe we'll come back to in a future episode. A couple I wanted to just briefly mention here are his projects Branded and Unbranded. He does a lot of work with advertisements and looking more deeply at the way that ads work in contemporary society. And so in Branded, he takes images that are not advertisements and puts branded imagery on top of them sort of looking at like the commodification of just people. He does this mostly with like sports imagery and, and one that's sort of an iconic image from this, it’s very striking is the Nike swish symbol, but having it look like an actual brand on people's skin. So there's one that I saw with it’s the back of a bald Black man's head and having the Nike swish symbol look as if it's actually been branded into him. And on the flip side of that, he has the Unbranded series in which he takes the ad copy out of ads. He has a bunch of—he has like dozens of magazines from 1968, which was a pivotal year in the civil rights movement. And as a way of looking at like what was actually being sold and what those messages everyone was getting were, he took the actual ad copy out of it. So you just have these images left, and you again are like seeing them in a different context and he, and he stressed that when you take out like the “drink Coke” or whatever you get to see what is actually being sold to you. Because yes, they they're giving you this ad because they want you to buy a Coca-Cola. What they're selling to you is the idea that you will be happy and successful in a very specific kind of way if you buy Coca-Cola. And so he's looking at what are those images and what are those, what those messages actually are.

Betty: I will say most of them, these are, they're quite creepy. It's like when you take out the messages, not that they weren't creepy even with the messages, but without them, you're just kind of like, look at these creepy people from 1950s, they’re just…

Quinn: Yeah! Cause I feel like with ads, like our brains have really been trained to just kind of be like, oh, whatever, it's an advertisement. And we almost like slide over it. But when you take the ad copy out, then you actually look at it more. Cause you're like, oh, what am I looking at here? Then you're like, oh, this is really weird. But I'm only going to briefly mention those and not get into them too much because we want to talk more about his most recent massive project, which is called For Freedoms. 

Betty: It's actually one of the reasons we kind of thought to talk about Hank Willis Thomas, is so when I was doing some research for our election night podcast, I was just looking at, you know, presidents in general. I was Googling FDR’s election and then I came across this work. So basically FDR’s speech from 1954, he had highlighted that there were Four Freedoms. Now this is the four, number four F O U R—

Quinn: This is a difficult thing to talk about in an audio medium is what I'll say.

Betty: Exactly. So it was his four basic fundamental human freedoms, and I guess as well as like American values, which is the freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. In 1943 the American artist Norman Rockwell did an interpretation of these four freedoms and he painted these four iconic paintings based on these values. And so now, I guess almost a hundred years later, not quite, Hank Willis Thomas, as well as collaborating with other artists and photographers like Emily Shur and Eric Gossman, they recreated these four freedoms into contemporary panels and that's called four freedoms, F O R freedoms. If that makes sense.

Quinn: Yeah. So the organization that Thomas founded is For Freedoms, and it was founded in 2016, actually as a political action committee, although it's since been sort of divested away from the PAC and now just operates under an LLC, but it created this giant artists collaboration basically, it's the largest artistic collaboration I believe that's ever happened in the United States, perhaps the world. There's just a massive number of contemporary artists who have been involved in this, and they've done a bunch of different things. They did a billboard campaign in 2016 that caused some controversy in different areas that like incorporated a lot of different artists’ work up on billboards. In 2018, they did another like giant billboard campaign. And then they also did this, like, specific take on the four freedoms, which is, this is where they reinterpreted Norman Rockwell's paintings in sort of a contemporary lens. And I think that both of us like found these images some of the most compelling of any of the work from this organization.

Betty: In a way, like they're very normal looking pictures, you know, there's for example, the recreation of one of the Norman Rockwell paintings, which is just someone giving a speech for freedom of speech. But of course there's multiple photographs of people that's not just the one white guy giving a speech, there's all kinds of different people like of different genders and races and all kinds of different people. 

Quinn: Like in the original paintings, real quick, so it's like, there's freedom of speech and it's like a white guy standing up amongst other people, freedom of worship and it's a bunch of white people praying on rosaries and stuff, freedom from want, which is like a happy family sitting down to what looks like Thanksgiving. They are all white. And then freedom from fear, which is again, a white family and it's a mother and father tucking two tiny, perfect children into bed.

Betty: The one that's the technique of the children to bed totally confused me. I was like, is this like a freedom from people not coming to kidnap your kids?

Quinn: Well you know, they're just not afraid of things. They're happy, they’re settling down to sleep. I think it's also worth noting that the Four Freedom speech by FDR was done in 1941, about a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II. And then the paintings were done in 1943 when the United States was like in the middle of participating in World War II. I feel like with all of them, but like, I think especially the freedom from fear is just like, good happy family, not scared of the war. 

Betty: Well, they're definitely not going to paint an Asian family then that's for sure.

Quinn: Yup. Well that brings us back to 2018.

Betty: Yeah. So I think, and some of my favorite photos, like some of them are actually kind of hilarious. The ones of, you know, what looks like Thanksgiving dinner of the family sitting around the turkey. Obviously in Hank Willis Thomas is in, in the For Freedoms photos. There's many different families and even like mixed race families. But I just really like how every time they try to recreate the guy in the bottom right corner with his eye, looking at the camera, it's the creepiest person usually, and with the creepiest smile.

Quinn: Oh my gosh, I know. Cause it's just this guy like peeking up towards the invisible camera man in like the original painting. But I think partially because of the new ones are actual photos and also they tend to get like more of that guy's face. It just is very, he always looks pretty creepy.

Betty: There is also one with like a creepy woman too. Equal opportunity creep.

Quinn: Yeah. But these are just cool. Like you said, they didn't just make one recreation of each picture. There's like dozens of each one representing all sorts of different kinds of people. And like specifically it's representing the diversity of America, but you know, just like, most places in the world in 2018, really. And I would say my favorite update is probably in the freedom of worship picture because like in the original it's like a little bit ambiguous what religion all of them are, but like, you could specifically see a rosary and it's like, ooh, so bold. You're Christian. Which is not really that difficult to be in the United States, versus like the new versions have people that are like outwardly, explicitly Muslim or Jewish, or like all just sorts of lots of different religions and showing like, actual freedom of worship of like lots of different kinds of people practicing different religions, rather than just sort of like freedom of Christianity, which is what the first one kind of implies.

Betty: Yeah. I think for sure, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, supposedly it's, you're free to practice whatever religion you want. So it kind of, I do think it makes more sense to show, especially when you have a lot of people in that one composition, like it'd be one thing if we were just, you know, painting one dude. But there's lots of people, you can definitely have different religions represented if you wanted to.

Quinn: And then the one with the family is really cool because they have different images where it's not just like, even beyond like having people of different races, it's not just a man and a woman with their like 2.5 perfect children. It's the, like some, there's a single dad or it's like a gay family. And like, you know, they have actual representation of what different families look like.

Betty: They literally do have like two and a half children in that original. It's like the two kids in bed and there's like a doll on the ground.

Quinn: Oh my God. It's 2.5 kids. 

Betty: Yeah. So it's a good thing it's not just like an arm and a leg. 

Quinn: Oh! Okay. The man in this painting is holding a newspaper with the headlines, like bombings kill, like horrific—people—

Betty: Oh, wow. 

Quinn: Okay. So I was right in my interpretation, but it was not, I was not being smart. I was doing the very obvious, very explicit interpretation of what this painting is. [laughs]

Betty: Ah, that’s okay. I probably could have… I mean, it is a very small text. 

Quinn: Hey, we got there.

Betty: At least we didn't get the whole thing wrong. 

Quinn: Yeah. But I mean like, and as you said, the reason why these sort of updated pictures are so compelling is not because they're that wildly interesting. It's because they are very normal. That's just what life looks like.

Betty: So most recently, there was another project that was done in the For Freedoms, F-O-R For Freedoms campaign, which was named the 50 States project. And so this is where they had created these billboard banners in all 50 states. And it was actually started out as a Kickstarter and again, many different artists collaborated on it. So it includes artists like the Guerilla Girls, as well as an artist that we previously spoke about, Ai WeiWei. And yeah, so I think like one thing that when I was reading in an interview, Hank Willis Thomas did say that, you know, of course people ask him how come you are always doing politically related work. And he really just believes you can't separate art from politics. And Ai WeiWei’s, you know, another artist who would also probably say the same thing, in Chinese. So, for example, so one of the, one of the billboards that Ai WeiWei contributed to was literally just a zoomed in of the middle of a face mask. So you can see the blue face mask and the folds. And there's just, just a question mark on it. All of these banners are, it kind of just makes you think, it's not, they're not all straightforward or at least most of them aren't and it kinda just supposed to make you go like, oh, like, what is it like, what is it trying to say? Like what, and then, you know, it makes you maybe go look into it a little bit more to see what, what's going on. Like there's another one by the artist Maggie Rogers that just says, “what do you really want?” Question mark.

Quinn: Oh God, I wish I knew. Well, all of that brings to the campaign that they just did this year, which was called 2020 Awakening. And this was kind of wild, partially because I started researching this and I pulled up their website forfreedoms.com and saw the symbol and went, hey, I've seen this! Because this symbol, which is like an infinity sign that says 2020 Awakening. And then there's like sort of a flag design, which is the For Freedoms symbol. And then like an eye, kind of, but it looks like there's a water drop in the middle. This symbol was like on a window in downtown Chicago, a place I rarely am, but I saw it the other day and I was like what is that? And then I was trying to read it and then the light changed and I crossed the street, but I'm glad I know now. I'm glad I've discovered this. So this, their 2020 Awakening project, is specifically it's about the election. I mean, obviously these projects all revolve around election years, but it's more than that as well. They have a whole playbook for people to follow, which basically encourages, you know, voting and sort of political action in that way, but also more generally like protesting and other ways to make a difference in their community beyond just going to the polls every like two years or whatever, as well as having like a lot of elements of like their—it’s sort of very avant garde abstract, like Illuminati design scheme for this year. And so there's a lot of sort of art and clothing related to this that you can get, to be part of this movement. And it is somewhat disconcerting, I’m not going to lie, like it was supposed to look disconcerting as the way that they designed this. But there are also like so many useful tools in this sort of toolkit that they put out that for as many people as possible to try to see like that shares, you know, their billboard project and like the billboards that they put up this year, as well as like your own signs that you can download directly to you, like training to host like virtual town halls, orientations for different social justice aspects. Like all of these different things are all included in this sort of overarching 2020 project. And I feel like this is a real cut of culmination of the art that they're doing, which of course like has always been very politically focused, but then taking that and even directly saying like, okay, like yes, please take our art design and our graphic design, whatever. But while you're at it, like go organize your community and be part of this national organizing that we're trying to do, because this is going to take a lot more than just voting and trying to raise awareness about voting. So like, let's get out here. And it's a very natural evolution of like both all of their work and also, you know, all of 2020. But we'll be very interested to see how this continues to propel after 2020 and as time goes on into the next years. 

Betty: Yeah. I definitely think this design of the project, in this 2020 project, is like similar to the billboards. Like they kind of, they kind of are a little bit weird and confusing, like when you first come across it. And I think it's meant to, it's meant for you to be intrigued and look into it. And yeah, like I think in the, on the playbooks, like one of them I'm just looking at, it says like the rules of play, like no one plays alone, everything you need to know, you don't, the rules always change. And so it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of, it wants you to be more aware and be more intrigued, intrigued, and interested, and in just like work with others and, and get educated yourself constantly. And not just, like you said, once every couple of years.

Quinn: Well, we will be watching this with interest as well as Hank Willis Thomas's other work. He had a big exhibit on display and it was traveling. Obviously things are pretty weird right now in terms of like where is art going? Will it come back? But I'm really hoping that in the nearish future that his latest exhibit will be able to come to Chicago and Toronto, so that we'll be able to see it. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pictorial. You can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial, and you can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. You can also find me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. And I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these podcast episodes to YouTube, where we edit in images of the artworks and other visual information as we speak about them, which will be, I think, required for this particular podcast. 

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!