images | text

Hank Willis Thomas
Born in 1976 in Plainfield, USA / Lives in New York, USA

Jens Hoffmann (JH): Your work titled I Am a Man (2009) relates to protest posters made during the civil rights era, specifically for a demonstration in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. Can you speak more about that event and how your work takes those posters as a starting point?

Hank Willis Thomas (HWT): I always refer to the series as I Am. Amen, which is the last painting in the series. I grew up looking at the famous photograph by Ernest Withers of dozens of African American men standing together in protest, each holding a sign saying “I am a man.” I found it amazing that it was necessary for large groups of people to come together and affirm their humanity in this country, just eight years before I was born. I was struck by how seemingly different the world I grew up in was from the world represented in the photograph. In a sense, 1968 was the last hurrah of the civil rights movement, and I am a product of the integrationist strategies that followed. I think of myself as a photo-conceptual artist in many ways. In this case, a photograph inspired a series of paintings. I’ve always been fascinated with remixing and riffing, especially visually. Growing up in the age of hiphop, the phrase I heard most often was “I am the man,” a reflection of the transition from collective statements during segregation to more individualistic statements during integration. The top row of paintings can be seen as a timeline dating back to the United States Constitution, when an African American was represented as three-fifths of a man, to the rallying calls of Sojurner Truth, who said “Ain’t I a woman.” I see the bottom row as a poem that starts with a playful rhythm and ends with an earnest affirmation. Rather than validating ourselves by anyone else’s standards, it suggests, the revelation is that consciousness alone is our greatest gift.

JH: Abolitionism, the movement to end slavery, employed a similar slogan: “Am I not a man and a brother?” The question appeared on the well-known Josiah Wedgwood antislavery medallions that depict a slave on his knees in shackles. These
coins were the most widely disseminated representations of African slaves in the 18th century.

HWT: Robin Kelly wrote an amazing essay discussing the politics of that image during the abolitionist movement. It was very fashionable for women of the time to wear pendants and other trinkets with the symbol, much like how people today wear wristbands representing various causes. Some argue that the slave’s kneeling, pleading pose reinforces the notion of the “merciful,” benevolent European. So it is controversial for that reason. The Wedgwood piece has played a prominent role in my work. The second painting in the I Am. Amen series is a subtle reference to it, did you pick up on that? I made a gold chain medallion based on it, with a man holding a diamond. It’s also on the cover of my book Pitch Blackness.