Hank Willis Thomas's new public artwork at Vancouver Art Gallery's Offsite captures empowerment and solidarity of last half-decade
Shown for the first time together and in water, three steel sculptures on West Georgia play with reflection
Hank Willis Thomas and his exhibition Offsite: Hank Willis Thomas, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite to April 27, 2024. Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery
A SHINY STEEL arm rises from a reflective pool, muscles tense as it grabs an arm wielding a police baton. Behind it, in a gesture of love and support: two disembodied pairs of arms intertwine, one set lifting the other. Nearby, in a third sculpture, a limb hoists a peace sign out of the water.
New York City–based artist Hank Willis Thomas’s new public artwork at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, outdoors at 1100 West Georgia Street, speaks with heart to the social upheaval of recent times—to empowerment and protest. And it was obvious that it was connecting with the public immediately after its unveiling on Friday. Instagrammers held up the peace sign in front of the same massive gesture; tourists posed in front of the trio of sculptures; and rush hour traffic slowed as drivers gawked at this silvery salute to agency and solidarity.
As Thomas said at an intimate press launch for the sculptures, the viewer is implicated in the works. A huge part of that is the material he has chosen: the polished stainless steel mirrors those who gaze into it. Because they’re disembodied, the limbs also allow the viewer to fill in their own details of each scenario.
“It’s a very cold, hard material,” he said of the stainless steel, “but it makes you think about strength and power. So I love the duality of looking at something and seeing myself reflected in it and having warmth and intimacy and tenderness—in steel.”
The three works, made consecutively in 2021, 2022, and 2023, sprung out of a period of seismic shifts in a postpandemic world. He reflected: “I made these in different mindframes—this concept of protest, play, and love.”
This is Thomas’s first solo exhibition in Vancouver, a result largely of his nine-year connection with Vancouver Art Gallery deputy director and director of curatorial programs Eva Respini. The three sculptures have never been displayed together before, and never been shown with water—an element that adds to their reflective power. The arms thrusting out of the pool also give a sense of surfacing, reminiscent of that old movie poster for Excalibur that depicted a fist pushing a glimmering sword out from underwater—making you think of emergence, coming up for air, survival, and exultation. At night, lighting allows the figures to throw magnified shadows across the modular highrise walls at the site.
On view for one year, the works assert a new kind of public “monument” in an era where old monuments are being toppled. Last year, Thomas unveiled The Embrace, a deeply moving 20-foot-tall sculpture, created in collaboration with MASS Design Group, that sits in Boston’s new 1965 Freedom Rally Memorial Plaza. It’s an homage to King's speech at the Common, his love for his wife Coretta, and the couple’s love for the world. Instead of a statue to a war leader, we see a monument to love and peace—two beautiful brown-bronze arms and hands intertwined.
Born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey, and raised in New York, Thomas grew up surrounded by art and artists. He was raised by a mother, Deborah Willis, who was an art photographer and NYU art-history professor, and a father, also Hank Thomas, who was a jazz musician, film producer, and physicist. Being surrounded by creatives was so everyday to his existence that, counterintuitively, “I never even thought of a career as an artist,” he said Friday. That changed in adulthood, his work going on to sit in the collections of top American institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art, and to be exhibited around North America and Europe.
Offsite: Hank Willis Thomas, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite to April 27, 2024. Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery
Respini noted that Thomas’s sculptural work reflects his background as a conceptual photographer and the way his images “crop” and “focus” in on an action—in this case body parts in gesture. The exhibit’s most intense sculpture, 2021’s Strike, was drawn directly from artist Louis Lozowick’s 1935 lithograph Strike Scene, from the Whitney Collection: it depicts a Black man stopping the baton of a policeman during union riots. The fist at the wrist “pierced” Thomas when he saw it.
It’s not hard to see why. Thomas’s depiction of the conflict in closeup brings to mind not just George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, but also the police violence that stirred African American uprisings during the 1960s. Quoting Mark Twain, Thomas mused at the unveiling that “History doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.”
Thomas is driven, in a way, to counteract the art of advertising—the images we’re inundated with on a daily basis that tell us what to buy, what to wear, and who to be. “We have so little time to reflect,” he said, “so I think fine art really has a civic duty.”
In past work, the artist has appropriated and reframed advertising copy to provocative effect: Thomas’s 2006 B®anded series superimposed the ubiquitous Nike swoosh logo onto the bodies of Black men, commenting on the objectification of African-American men and alluding to the branding of slaves by their owners.
Ultimately, the gleaming silver forms in Offsite: Hank Willis Thomas vie for attention alongside the bus shelter ads and glowing store signs along West Georgia. Albeit here they demand an altogether different kind of attention, not just to the conflict and oppression raging around the world in this tumultuous last half decade, but also to hope. "Often we're much more comfortble talking about the pain in our heart and sharing that pain in our heart," reflected Thomas. "And while I revel in that, I've been making a more and more conscious effort in my practice to find ways toward love and liberation." 
Hank Willis Thomas and his exhibition Offsite: Hank Willis Thomas, at the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite to April 27, 2024. Photo by Vancouver Art Gallery
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