Over the past decade, 47-year-old Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas has become one of the most active public sculptors working in the United States today. He has more than a dozen projects to his name and many more in the pipeline destined for cities from Miami to Los Angeles.
Earlier this year, Thomas unveiled his most ambitious public project to date: The Embrace, a 19-ton monument to Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, on Boston Common. In addition to being one of the largest bronze sculptures in America, it has become one of the most talked-about – landing prime-time spots on CNN, Fox News, and The Daily Show – and misinterpreted. (More on that later.)
The potential for misunderstanding is also the subject of Thomas’s contribution to Art Basel’s Parcours sector, a free public art display in Basel’s city center organized for the seventh year running by curator Samuel Leuenberger. One of 26 site-specific projects presented under the theme ‘Word of Mouth’, Duality (reflection) (2023) is a stainless-steel sculpture of an arm holding up two fingers in a V.
‘It’s making what we would call a peace sign but, depending on where you’re from, it could signal victory, it could be an offensive gesture, or it could be a number,’ Thomas explained from his Brooklyn studio. ‘It speaks to how everything can be seen from multiple perspectives.’
The way that context and cultural conditioning shape how we see the world has always been central to Thomas’s multimedia oeuvre. One of his most celebrated bodies of work, Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America (2005–08), is a compilation of dozens of magazine advertisements featuring Black people, published between 1968 to 2008. By removing all logos and text from the images, Thomas presents an unsettling account of how stereotypes about race, gender, and ethnicity are strategically deployed to make people feel inadequate (but that a pair of sneakers or a tube of lipstick just might complete them).
Like advertisements, public art gets under our skin and into our psyches. Growing up along the East Coast, Thomas had formative encounters with two very different kinds of public monuments. First, there were the sweeping, epic constructions that trumpet America’s grandeur: the Statue of Liberty (1886) in New York City, for instance, or the Washington Monument (1884) in D.C.
Then, there was a more intimate form of public art, which Thomas found in Philadelphia. He recalls staring up in wonder at Claes Oldenburg’s towering Clothespin (1976) and taking family photos in front of a monumental sculpture along the Schuylkill River. ‘In our family history, these can be places of union or reunion,’ Thomas said. ‘Unity is a theme in my public art.’
It is this second form of public art that most appeals to Thomas. And it feels especially urgent in the United States, where violence is the most common subject of public memorials. According to a National Monument Audit published by the nonprofit Monument Lab in 2021, 33% of conventional monuments in the US include mentions of war. The report also found that ‘the ratio of public records that refer to war and peace monuments is 13:1. The ratio of war to love is 17:1. And the ratio of war to care is 59:1.’
Thomas is doing his best to shift those figures. His public artworks – including the one destined for Basel – often depict hands as a symbol of connection, intimacy, or triumph. In April, he and collaborator Coby Kennedy unveiled Reach at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which captures two monumental hands in midair, reaching toward one another – or having just parted.
Meanwhile, Thomas’s sculpture All Power to All People (2017) in Philadelphia combines a monumental Afro pick with a raised fist: two symbols of Black solidarity and pride. ‘I’m excited for more opportunities to do something I believe is meaningful for my children and grandchildren, to celebrate and make moments around,’ the artist told me.
Thomas is also part of a recent, and still nascent, movement in America to acknowledge slavery through public sculpture. (According to Monument Lab, just 0.5% of America’s public works represent enslaved people and abolition efforts.) With These Hands, a forthcoming project commissioned by Davidson College in North Carolina, is a memorial to the enslaved people who made the bricks for the college’s original buildings. It will depict two large hands outstretched, emerging from the earth.
Not every work Thomas makes is universally celebrated. The Embrace was intended as a poetic depiction of the entangled arms of King and his wife based on a photo of the two celebrating his Nobel Peace Prize win in 1964. But it became the target of a wave of social-media mockery when some suggested that it resembled a sex act more than a loving embrace.
Asked if the response changed the way he felt about making public art, Thomas was unequivocal. ‘Yes. It made it abundantly clear that it’s not about me and it’s not about my intentions,’ he said. ‘I realize that I unconsciously made something so historic… When the only things they can compare it to are the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Vietnam War Memorial, that’s…’ he trailed off, ‘awkward.’
While Thomas’s was the most representational sculpture of the shortlisted proposals, some critics still wanted to see the Kings depicted more figuratively, longing for a riposte to the conventional statues of far-less-admirable figures they grew up looking at. (Notably, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite wall designed by Maya Lin in 1982, was greeted with so much controversy – US Senator Jim Webb called it ‘a nihilistic slab of stone’ – that the site was revised to include a figurative sculpture of a soldier.)
Thomas is sympathetic, but bristles at the restriction. ‘These were people who lived, breathed, and moved,’ he said. ‘Do you want them [depicted] when they were 20? 12? 39? Which day? Which feeling? There’s so much we just take for granted because we’ve been conditioned to see respectability and honor represented in one way or another.’
Thomas estimates he spends as much as 50% of his time on public art projects, including those he produces with For Freedoms, the artist-run platform for civic engagement he co-founded in 2016. He also developed a keen understanding of the bureaucratic and practical realities of public sculpture as a member of the New York City Public Design Commission, which reviews all proposals for public art on city-owned property.
‘When I make public sculpture now, I think about what is daring and exciting, that nobody will get killed on, that won’t require too much maintenance, that won’t piss too many people off, and that will stay around indefinitely,’ Thomas said.
Such works can take as many as 10 years to realize, don’t generate much income, and often require multiple rounds of design. Considering all the caveats, scrutiny, and labor, what keeps Thomas involved in public projects?
‘A couple got engaged at the opening of The Embrace. Someone sent me pictures of a person exercising there every day,’ he said. ‘There is no work I can make that goes into a museum or a gallery or a collector’s home that can be certain to have an impact on millions of people. You can’t put a price tag on that.’
Hank Willis Thomas is represented by Ben Brown Fine Arts (London, Hong Kong, Palm Beach), Pace Gallery (New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Seoul), Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London), Kayne Griffin (Los Angeles), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York).
Julia Halperin is a writer and editor based in New York. She is also the co-founder of the Burns Halperin Report.
Captions for full-bleed image (from top to bottom): 1. Hank Willis Thomas, The Embrace, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts. 2&3. Hank Willis Thomas, Installation view of All Power To All People (2017). Courtesy of the artist and Ben Brown Fine Arts.