Hank Willis Thomas' I AM MANY Implicates Us All in the Making of History

Hank Willis Thomas
Roots (After Bearden), 2023
screenprint and UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond
97.625 × 122 × 3 inches (framed)

text by Hank Manning

Truth is black and white–or is it? In I AM MANY at Jack Shainman Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas invites us to consider how perspective changes our understanding of art, nationhood, oppression, solidarity, and the relationship between the past and present.

In direct reference to the 1,300 identical “I AM A MAN” signs carried during the Black sanitation workers strike of 1968, I AM MANY proposes itself as an antipode to the famed rallying cry. It was this demonstration where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

As guests enter, the words “LOVE OVER RULES” blink in neon blue. To the left, one black and one white arm stretch towards the heavens, their hands grasped. This marble sculpture is titled Loving Day, in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly surnamed couple whose legal battles enshrined the right to interracial marriage in America. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Community, 2024
Polished stainless steel
33.25 × 33.5 × 11.8125 inches

Upstairs, hands continue to feature prominently in the exhibition’s bronze and stainless steel statues. Hands impart the toll of one’s work, reach out for help, link together, call for action, but also violently apprehend. Hands direct actions from the aesthetic–grooming hair–to the existential–resisting or abetting violence.

Hank Willis Thomas
America (gray), 2025
mixed media including decommissioned US prison uniforms
68 x 159 x 1.25 inches

Each piece of Thomas’s visual art demands a second viewing: from a closer distance or a different angle, with more light or more context. Upon first glance, a wall work made partially from decommissioned prison uniforms spells out “AMERICA,” but as we approach, the letters become a dizzying maze. “EVERYTHING” on a lenticular print actually consists of innumerable small “NOTHING”s. Op art prints shift as we walk from left to right, challenging our understanding of the black-white dichotomy. In each of these works, our first impressions are betrayed by unexpected paradoxical interpretations. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Until Ex parte Endo, 2024
UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond, decommissioned US flag
78.5 x 57.5 x 9 inches (framed and assembled)

With written instructions, the exhibition invites us to use a camera flash to uncover the palimpsestic nature of the work, revealing images that are often lost to history. Under an American flag and an old portrait of the US Capitol building, light reveals children of varied races pledging allegiance. Numerous faces of protestors, those who came together to fight and build our current world, appear etched into UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. In the final room upstairs, prints of the pamphlet “Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot” hang. When illuminated, they unveil photographs of protesters, armed police, and smashed windows. One multiple mixed-media quilt is described as “reminiscent of a QR code,” emblematic of the way that the incarcerated are treated like “faceless numbers on a spreadsheet.” 

The late King’s presence and guidance are felt throughout the exhibition. But it is not his face hidden within the works. Rather, we see the thousands of people who listened to him declare, “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thomas forces us to reconsider not just how we understand our world today, but how we read history, from the slave trade to the Civil Rights movement to our present day. It is the story of not just a man, or any person, but many. The exhibition’s continuous and multifaceted interactivity nudges us: we too are part of the story and must move, shed light, think critically, and use our voices. 


Hank Willis Thomas: I AM MANY is on view until November 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York

Alfredo Jaar Indulges In Radical Pessimism with "The Temptation to Exist" @ Galerie Thomas Schulte

For over four decades, Alfredo Jaar has used photography, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex sociopolitical issues and the ethics and limits of representation.

The exhibition’s title makes a reference to a book by Emil Cioran, one of the artist’s favorite writers. A dark, subversive thinker, Cioran was the poet of pessimism. A philosopher who was always on the verge of suicide, he once said: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin. Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. A book is a suicide postponed.” For Cioran, failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can art and the human condition. “No longer wanting to be a man” he is dreaming of another form of failure he wrote. “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.”

For Jaar, art is the impossible answer to an impossible question: how do we make art when the world is in such a state? In the gallery’s main space, an immersive experience is created with a large, red neon work, where the words of the stoic philosopher Seneca take center stage. Seneca strongly believed that if we have the essentials and a strong inner spirit, we can radically accept and endure any circumstances. Eschewing the presence of other objects, the room is entirely illuminated with a dense red light, building an atmosphere of poetic uncertainty, mirroring the unease of contemporary times. The philosopher’s emblematic phrase glimmers in the space, reacting to the tyranny of the white box space and filling it with an idea—a model for thinking about the world.

Jaar’s second part of the exhibition fills the second, smaller gallery space with more than 50 works from a diverse group of artists, including Bas Jan Ader, Rosa Barba, Angela de la Cruz, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Zanele Muholi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and more. Here, the artist has tried to create what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.”

The Temptation to Exist is on view through August 12th at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin.

Destiny Haven Trujillo's "Devoraste" @ DIMIN

 
Destiny Haven Trujillo, Daddy’s Little Girl Ain’t A Girl No More, 2023. All images courtesy of DIMIN.

Destiny Haven Trujillo, Daddy’s Little Girl Ain’t A Girl No More, 2023. All images courtesy of DIMIN.

Devoraste—opening to the public on June 1—is a neon diary of the vivid exploits of Destiny Haven Trujillo. For her first solo exhibition in New York, Trujillo embodies the manic charm of her daily life, offering a voyeuristic glimpse into the contemporary vie boheme. The title of the show, “Devoraste,” is derived from the Spanish aphorism meant to convey the concept of unabashed queer self-expression, with the literal translation “you ate that!” For Trujillo, Devoraste references the celebration of pride she conveys in her paintings—colorful bacchanals teeming with joy.

At its core, the work addresses sexual identity and fluidity. The acceptance she has found in the queer community is tantamount in importance to the artist personally as it is to her artistic concept. Approachability is one of the major goals of Trujillo’s canvases—her goal is to welcome the broadest audience possible.

Devoraste is on view through July 7 at DIMIN, 406 Broadway, Fl. 2, New York,

 

Andrew Kreps Gallery NY Presents Think of Our Future By Andrea Bowers

As our global freedoms decline, Andrea Bowers is trying to move from grief to hope by focusing on youth activists beginning with the new video, My Name Means Future. Centered on Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who has been involved with the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline since its inception, the video continues Bowers’s commitment to documenting important activists of her time. Bowers asked the young activist to show her some of her most sacred places in South Dakota. With a small group of friends - all artists and activists, they traveled together for 4 days in September recording video interviews and landscape drone shots of the youth activist discussing the landscapes, their histories, as well as the personal and political issues that arose from being in these sacred sites. In the Lakota language, “Tokata” means “Future”.

In response to her journey with Iron Eyes and the climate emergency we are currently experiencing, Bowers has created a new series of neon works based on the designs of tree branches that incorporate quotes from eco-feminists. These monumental and sculptural pieces are made entirely of reused and recycled materials, inspired by Judi Bari and the Earth First call to action, “Resist Reuse Restore”.

Think of Our Future will be on view throughout February 15, 2020 at Andrew Kreps Gallery 22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Kacie Lees Presents Necessary Phenomenon @ O’ Project Space In Los Angeles

Kacie Lees is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY who uses video, neon, sculpture & installation as tools to explore theories of the void and source pathways to underdeveloped senses. Her practice builds on the experimental legacy of new media with an expansion towards fluid notions of space. Necessary Phenomenon will be on view through April 14 at O’ Project Space 2618 Pasadena Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Gabriel Rico Presents "The Discipline of the Cave" @ The Aspen Art Museum In Colorado

Combining aesthetic traditions associated with the Arte Povera movement and influenced by scientific, philosophical, and geometric principles, Rico collects the fragments, found objects, and materials of contemporary existence. Using culturally manufactured items like neon, taxidermy, concrete, and coins, as well as such natural elements as tree branches, stones, and fruit, he recontextualizes and arranges each in ways that both captivate and confound viewers through their poetic, wry, jarring relationships. Through juxtapositions of objects and an artistic process that fuses the natural and kitsch, Rico elicits a further investigation of our human environment and the natural world via non-mathematical equations using elements that reflect and illuminate a fundamental human urge to achieve balance.The Discipline of the Cave, on view through June 16 at the Aspen Art Museum 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen. photographs by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

The Museum Of Modern Art & MoMA PS1 Present First Major Retrospective Of Bruce Nauman In 25 Years

Co-organized by The Museum of Modern Art and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts draws upon the rich holdings of both institutions and nearly 70 lenders. Encompassing Nauman’s full career and featuring a total of 165 works, the exhibition occupies the Museum’s entire sixth floor and the whole of MoMA PS1. This joint presentation provides an opportunity to experience Nauman’s command of a wide range of mediums, from drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture to neon, performance, film and video, and architecturally scaled environments.

Disappearing Acts traces strategies of withdrawal in Nauman’s art—both literal and figurative incidents of removal, deflection, and concealment. Close relatives of disappearance also appear in many forms. They are seen, for example, in holes the size of a body part, in the space under a chair, in the self vanishing around a corner, and in the mental blocks that empty creative possibility. “For Nauman,” said Halbreich, “disappearance is both a real phenomenon and a magnificently ample metaphor for grappling with the anxieties of both the creative process and of navigating the everyday world.”

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is on view through February 18 @ The Museum of Modern Art, and through February 25 @ MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, New York. photographs courtesy of MoMA

A Belgian Artist Makes His Big Break In America: Read Our Interview With Musician and Artist Joris Van de Moortel →

Joris Van de Moortel, 31, has intrusive bluish-gray eyes. They are unsettling; despite the subdued kindness that surrounds them. Looking in to them one realizes Moortel doesn’t see the same boundaries most of us do, the boundaries that most of us construct our lives around. Moortel smashes, sometimes literally, the line between art and music. He is both musician and artist and the two feed off one another. Moortel makes mixed media pieces that often incorporate elements of his musical performances; a guitar he smashed on stage the night before, panels from a stage he played on. Sometimes the work comes after a performance; sometimes it’s made during. Read our interview with the artist here.