Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas is showing at Los Angeles’ Pace Gallery for the first time. The exhibition’s title, I’ve Known Rivers, references the 1921 Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in which water is a central subject, as it is in the artist’s exhibition. Like Hughes’ poem, Thomas’ art has layers of context and invites you to investigate further and travel to places unseen.

Hank Willis Thomas Retroreflective Art

This debut exhibition showcases five examples of Hank Willis Thomas’ retroreflective art. Large collage artworks — which appear differently depending upon the angle and light under which they are seen. Latent images in the paintings are revealed under UV flash light as the viewer’s perspective changes, alluding to ideas, history and meanings not initially visible.

Over the last decade, the Brooklyn based Thomas has mastered the retroreflective medium, creating mixed media works that reveal two distinct scenes transfigured by both ambient and flash lighting.

Seen from one perspective, these artworks present bold figurations, abstractions, and landscapes in saturated colors; seen from another, fragmented archival scraps from Thomas’s production of other retroreflective works over the last decade are revealed.

As these elements converge and transform, they shed light on Thomas’s artistic process and the historical references that recur throughout his practice.

The vibrant compositions on view in Thomas’s exhibit are steeped in art history, and speak to the artist’s continued explorations of abstraction through the lenses of colonization, globalization, and appropriation. Alluding to the work of Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, and Malick Sidibé, the artist’s newest retroreflective works mine the complex origins and histories of modern art across Africa, the United States, and Europe.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” By Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

About the artist:

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey) is a conceptual artist widely known for his investigations of themes relating to mass media, identity, popular culture, and perspective. A trained photographer, the artist works across many disciplines and media, including sculpture, film, screen-printing, and installation. In his practice, Thomas often seeks out and utilizes recognizable icons from popular branding and marketing campaigns, encouraging viewers to question commercial consumer representation and the racial stereotypes it perpetuates. He is also renowned for his public artworks, which always invite a form of viewer participation and contribution. Among his recent public projects is the large-scale bronze sculpture The Embrace (2023), unveiled on the Boston Common in January 2023.

Thomas is the co-founder of For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement. In 2022, For Freedoms received the National Art Award from Americans for the Arts, and it was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform in 2017. In addition to For Freedoms, Thomas’s collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and The Writing on the Wall.

The artist’s work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the United States and abroad, including the International Center of Photography in New York; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris; the Hong Kong Arts Centre; and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship; The Guggenheim Fellowship; the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize; and the Soros Equality Fellowship, among other awards and honors.

Thomas earned a BFA from New York University in 1998 and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2004. He has received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore; the San Francisco Art Institute; and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Hank Willis Thomas

Hank Willis Thomas
I’ve Known Rivers
On View: Jul 15 – Aug 26, 2023
Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

Images and information courtesy of Pace Gallery and Hank Willis Thomas