Hank Willis Thomas Lecture
Join our community for an artist’s talk with Hank Willis Thomas, creator of With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited on Davidson’s campus. Thomas is a conceptual artist whose work explores perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. In this lecture, Thomas will discuss With These Hands alongside his broader art practice, considering how such public projects connect to and inform his larger practice and bodies of work.
Thomas' work has been exhibited at internationally acclaimed venues, 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, among many others.
His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males; In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth); The Writing on the Wall; The Gun Violence Memorial Project; and For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.
Thomas was the 2022 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts honoree from the Office of Art in Embassies, Washington, DC. Additionally, he is the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), the Aperture West Book Prize (2008), the Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is a former member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.