Hank Willis Thomas, A Place to Call Home (Africa-America), 2009

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.

His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.

In 2019, Thomas unveiled his permanent work "Unity" in Brooklyn, NY. In 2017, “Love Over Rules” permanent neon was unveiled in San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” in Opa Locka, FL. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.
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An excerpt from an interview with Jens Hoffman: "Most African Americans have trouble tracing their roots beyond a generation into slavery. I have been asked in the past "where are you from" on several occasions by people who seem bewildered and disappointed when I say "New York, Philadelphia before that, and Virginia before that". I conceived of A place to call home: Africa America because I wanted to create a place which African Americans could be "from". Most of us have never been to Africa and have never felt totally at home in the U.S.. Nevertheless, both places are clear that both of these places have deep resonance in how we define ourselves or are understood by others in our increasingly hyphenated society. The piece also considers the way African Americans arrived in the Americas via forced migration is as easily overlooked as the way these two continents put together conflate and distort reality at first glance."

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Hank Willis Thomas United States, b. 1976

Exhibitions