Hank Willis ThomasForever Now
For his first solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery in South Africa in over a decade, Hank Willis Thomas presents new works that probe how we see, remember, and participate in shared histories. The exhibition brings together text-based lenticular works and retroreflective pieces collaging archival visuals, alongside sculptural and installation works that speak to Thomas’s broader public-art practice and his ongoing interest in recontextualising familiar forms.
As with his debut Johannesburg exhibition, History Doesn’t Laugh, Thomas approaches the South African context with deliberate care, setting the African-American experience in conversation with South Africa’s own histories of struggle, aspiration, and visual culture.
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“Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” Nelson Mandela once wrote – an idea that reverberates throughout Thomas’s practice. Thomas has long spoken of the enduring power of love and its extraordinary impact, often describing his work as a “call to action, or call to love.” This idea anchors the exhibition and becomes particularly visible in a major new variation of his iconic work Love Rules. Honouring his cousin Songha Willis, who was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000, the illuminated sculpture cycles through shifting letters to form different messages of love, including “love over rules,” echoing Willis' last recorded message. Installed publicly at the Brooklyn Museum in another iteration, Love Rules (Horizon Blue) proposes love as a mutable force shaped by circumstance and collective will.
Sculptural works further advance Thomas’s commitment to articulating connection, unity, and shared humanity. The Embrace derives from the artist’s permanent memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common and presents intimacy as a powerful container for collective action. Works such as “we wanted to come home.” and Reach extend this focus, isolating fleeting physical interactions to consider how identity, perseverance, and community are held within the body.
In Silver Lining (2025), Thomas adapts a work honouring the so-called “Greatest Generation” and “Silent Generation” in the United States – audiences who witnessed Dr King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the South African version, an image of the crowd listening to Nelson Mandela following his release becomes the point of resonance. Today, that moment carries layered meanings: for some, a symbol of hard-won possibility; for others, particularly younger generations facing persistent inequality, a reminder of unfulfilled promises. Across both contexts, Thomas reflects on how communities endure division, fear, and profound political shifts, and how their collective presence continues to shape the world we inherit.
Thomas says, "Love is a verb of action. Its meaning goes beyond the romantic idea of it. Love is an invitation to people to stand up and be generous every day of their lives. It is not an action of receiving, but rather an action of giving. My question is what you do to give love? How love is breaking the rules you have in your life?"
Artist Bio
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, New Jersey, United States) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.
Thomas has 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 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
His collaborative projects include, 'Question Bridge: Black Males,' 'In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth),' 'Writing on the Wall,' and the artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement, 'For Freedoms,' which in 2017 was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). In 2017, he received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.
