Artist Talk: Hank Willis Thomas

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts welcomes artist Hank Willis Thomas for a free public talk. Working across sculpture, retroreflective and lenticular works, textile pieces, and mixed-media assemblages, Thomas explores intersections of past and present—revealing continuities in lived experience and offering messages of love, connection, and hope.

The UMFA is honored to currently have Hank Willis Thomas’s Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness on loan from Art Bridges Foundation. This incredible neon artwork is on view in the Elizabeth Farran Tozer and W. James Tozer, Jr. Lobby, and is one of the first things you see when you enter the Museum.

Thomas’s neon artworks use wordplay to spark questions about the construction of language and how it shapes our perceptions of race and society. Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness turns the adjectives “off-white” and “pitch-black” into the nouns “whiteness” and “blackness.”

About the Artist:

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is a conceptual artist whose work examines themes of identity, perspective, commodity, media, and popular culture. Thomas’ interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, photography, retroreflectives, quilt-based works, film, and more, often challenging the viewer to critically engage with the complexities of contemporary culture. Thomas has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR (2019) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH (2020); the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. (2021); and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024).

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 & 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 was the Harmer/Eisner Artist-in-Residence in for Aspen Institute Arts Program (2024-2025) and the recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), 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.

Thomas’ public art practice includes permanent artworks around the country, including The Embrace (2023) on the Boston Common in Boston, MA; With These Hands: A Memorial to the Enslaved and Exploited (2025) at Davidson College in Davidson, NC; REACH (2023), made in collaboration with Coby Kennedy, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL; Duality (2023) at The Underline in Miami, FL; and The Truth is I Love You (2023), at the Austin Public Library, Austin, TX. Additional permanent public artworks include Unity (2019) in Downtown Brooklyn, NY; Love Over Rules at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, CA; and All Power to All People in Opa Locka, FL.

Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from MASS Art, MA, CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA in 2025; CCA the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2024 as well as honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.

He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

This event is made possible by Art Bridges Foundation.

Hank Willis Thomas © Hank Willis Thomas. Photography Credit: Jai Lennar 

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