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.” 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 Wilis’ 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.

“I saw in that moment, how much of his weight was literally on top of her. And I thought that was a really symbolic idea: That she was literally holding his weight.”

- Hank Willis Thomas

The Embrace (2023) derives from Thomas’s permanent memorial to Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common. The monument foregrounds an intimate gesture rather than full figural representation. "When we recognise that all storytelling is an abstraction, all representation is an abstraction," Thomas notes, "it allows us to be open to more dynamic and complex forms of representation." In scaled form, this small version of The Embrace further universalises this idea, shifting the focus from hero worship to shared humanity and collective action.