Hank Willis Thomas

The name was inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell's paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941)—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Through exhibitions, installations, and public programs, the organization is established to deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values, and to advocate for equality, dialogue, and civic participation.

In collaboration with photographers Emily Shur and Wyatt Gallery, Thomas and For Freedoms transformed Norman Rockwell's depictions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1941 address to Congress, which articulated FDR's vision of the four basic human freedoms.

Thomas wrote that "The image haunted me because of the world we live in. I wanted to imagine what it would look like today."

Through dozens of iterations of Rockwell's original four paintings, the 82 images in the campaign attempted to reflect the immeasurable diversity of American identities today.

Celebrities such as Rosario Dawson, Dolores Huerta, Gina Belafonte, Van Jones, Jesse Williams, Robert A. Nakamura and Karen L. Ishizuka, Kiran Gandhi, Michael Ealy, Saul Williams, Rodney Barnette, and others were included in the reinterpretations.

The new version of the images were widely shared on social media and Instagram, including by celebrities such as Alicia Keys and Jada Pinkett-Smith.

Hank Willis Thomas (born 1976) is an American conceptual artist.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, he works primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.

Hank Willis Thomas was born in 1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey to Hank Thomas, a jazz musician, and Deborah Willis, artist, photographer, curator and educator.

Thomas attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts as a Museum Studies student.

Thomas holds a B.F.A. in Photography and Africana studies from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. in Photography and Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts (2004).

His work has been featured in other publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000), and the exhibitions along with accompanying publications 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003), and 30 Americans (RFC, 2008).

Thomas is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November, 2008).

In 2012, Question Bridge: Black Males debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected for the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute.

His two screenprints of 2013, And I Can't Run and Blow the Man Down, express the erasure of past injustices to the black male body by printing photographs of humiliations or executions of black men on retro-reflective vinyl (commonly used for street signs), rendering them invisible except under flash photography.

Thomas has a permanent installation at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

The piece, titled Rise Up, depicts a cement wall with statues of black heads and bodies emerging from the top of the wall whose arms are raised in surrender.

The piece comments on the incidents of police violence and police brutality that are prevalent in current American society.

Founded in 2016 along with artist Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, For Freedoms is an anti-partisan platform for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.

In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.

His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.

Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform.

In 2017, Thomas also unveiled his permanent public artwork Love Over Rules in San Francisco and All Power to All People in Opa Locka, Florida.

Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the MFA programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.

Thomas is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London and Hong Kong; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium.

Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Hank Willis Thomas' collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco.

Thomas explores the representation of the African-American male body in visual culture in his B(r)anded Series. Writing in The Guardian, critic Arwa Mahdawi observed: "Thomas's work 'unbrands' advertising: stripping away the commercial context, and leaving the exposed image to speak for itself."

Other major publications include Aperature's Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal... (2018), and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PPAC)'s The Philly Block Project (2017).

In 2018, For Freedoms launched the 50 State Initiative, the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history.

In the fall of 2018, For Freedoms launched a major billboard campaign in every state, including Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

The campaign included over 150 contemporary artists, including Marilyn Minter, Rashid Johnson, Guerrilla Girls, and Theaster Gates, among others.

In October 2018, For Freedoms also launched a photo campaign entitled Four Freedoms.

Thomas' first comprehensive survey Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal... opened at the Portland Art Museum in fall 2019 and will travel to additional U.S. museums in 2020.

The exhibition will highlight Thomas' devotion to reframing perspectives on difficult issues central to American history and the representation of race and the politics of visual culture.

In January 2023, his sculpture "The Embrace" was unveiled in the 1965 Freedom Plaza on the Common in Boston, Massachusetts.

The 20 foot high bronze sculpture honors Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King and depicts their arms embracing.

The artwork was inspired by a black and white photo of the couple sharing an embrace after Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize.