Episode 11 When Love Over Rules: Hank Willis Thomas

The need for civic dialogue has never been as important as it is today. In the US and around the world, communities are facing complex problems. Finding solutions is contentious. How can art help bring people together across lines of difference to talk, listen, and understand the myriad forces shaping civic life? We bring you a conversation with Hank Willis Thomas, a boundary-spanning artist whose work grapples with hard truths. Our co-hosts are professors Sama Alshaibi and Jennifer Saracino. They speak with Hank about his exhibition, LOVERULES. The show has over 90 of his works, including photography, sculpture, installation, and printmaking, representing two decades of a socially-engaged art practice that invites audiences to look more carefully and act more collectively. In this episode, we learn why Hank believes all art is political; how he infuses a collaborative ethos to create opportunities for civic dialogue; and how to tap into the radical power of love to heal individuals and communities on the brink of crisis.

A recipient of numerous honors, including the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019) and The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), Hank Willis Thomas is influenced by social history and an unflinching concern for equality in all aspects of his creative practice. He co-founded For Freedoms an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action. His artwork has been shown internationally and is collected by major museums across the nation. The exhibition LOVERULES can be viewed through June 21, 2025, at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, in partnership with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Race remix mix.
Welcome to Race Remix Conversationswith artists,
performers, educators and thought leaderscurated to help you unlock
the power of imagination and experiencethe impossible as possible.
The need for civic dialog has never beenas important as it is today.

(00:20):
In the U.S.
and around the world,communities are facing
complex problems,and finding solutions is contentious.
How can art help to bring people togetherto talk with each other across
lines of difference, to listen and grapplewith the hard truths,
to understandthe forces that shape civic life?
We bring you a conversation with HankWillis Thomas, a boundary spanning artist

(00:45):
whose work asks us to look more carefullyand to act more collectively.
Our co-hosts are ProfessorsSam Alshaibi and Jennifer Saracino.
They speak with Hank about his exhibition,LOVERULES.
The show has over 90 of his works,including photography, sculpture,
installation and printmaking,
representing two decadesof a socially engaged art practice.

(01:07):
In this
episode, we learn why Hank believesall art is political.
How he infuses a collaborative ethosto create opportunities for civic dialog.
And how to tap into the radical powerof love to heal
individuals and communitieson the brink of crisis.
The love of a rules exhibitioncan be viewed through June 21st, 2025,

(01:28):
at the University of ArizonaMuseum of Art, in partnership
with the Jordan Schnitzer familyFoundation.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Sama Alshaibi , and I'm pleased to bein a recording studio with Jen Saracino.
Thanks, Sama.
I'm really excited, too,because today we're speaking with Hank
Willis Thomas, a conceptual artistbased in Brooklyn, New York.

(01:48):
His work spansa variety of media materials and processes
with iconic works, like the seriesof photographic prints titled Branded
that depicts Black menbranded with commercial logos.
Branded is on display in the exhibitionLes Overalls,
currently showing in the Universityof Arizona Museum of Art.
Another one of his works on display

(02:09):
in the sculpture gardenjust outside the exhibition is Liberty.
It features the castbronze arm of an athlete,
the retired NBA All-Star Juwan Howard.
He spends a basketball on his indexfinger,
a gesture that is reminiscent of the torchatop the Statue of Liberty.
So welcome, Hank.
Thank you for being with us here today.
Thank you so much for having me.

(02:30):
It's great to be here.
So right now, we're having your exhibitionright here at the University of Arizona.
And I was at the museum
the other day, and I was confronted withone of my favorite photographs of yours.
I think it's called Scarred Chest.
And it shows like the full chestof a male body
branded with several Nike swoosh marks.

(02:53):
I believe I saw that for the first timeat the National Graduate Seminar
at Columbia.
And your mom, the amazing Dr.
Deb Willis, who I didn't personally knowat the time, I think I just met her
for the first time there.
She was presenting your workto the graduate students.
So this is 2004.
Were you still in graduate school then?
Yeah, I was.

(03:14):
Well, your mom was giving you a shot
against your work,and I thought that was pretty amazing.
And I looked at that.
I'm like,this person's going to go very far. Yeah.
With your mom bragging about, you know.
No, because the work was that good.
It was about a topic of thatseminar was about mediated images.

(03:35):
And so I think it really fit in.
Can you maybe describe that work
and how you got to that projectgoing way back here to grad school?
Yeah.
So that that image is calledScarred Chest.
I don't know if I was 2002 or 2003and it is a photograph of a torso
exclusivelykind of dead on of a really chiseled

(03:56):
brown body and on the chest other,I don't know, are ten or
Nike swooshes that look liketheir keloids on their chest.
So they look like they've been brandedon that person's body.
And I was thinking a lot about howslaves were branded and the United States
people, enslaved people were brandedas a sign of ownership.

(04:18):
And how so often now we brand ourselves
with products we buy or wear or driveor talk to people on.
And also think about scarificationand the ways in which people have used
branding as a wayto identify themselves with community
and wanted to kindof highlight those dualities.

(04:40):
it's interesting.
I didn't know about thisthe scarification component of that.
So is that like referencing particular
African tribal markersor more like tattoo work
or something to besides that it’sobviously the branding of slavery.
Yeah I think itbut it's not a specific community
but just thinking about that,that form of beautification.

(05:02):
Amazing.
Well I guess that could start about
that going back to likehow did you get into making art?
And I know that's kind of probablya question you've answered a lot, but
and we'd like to know a little bitabout your how how did you get here?
How did you start being an artist?Can you share your earliest
memory of art making?

(05:23):
Okay.
Well, my mother, Deborah Willis,as you mentioned, is a photo historian,
but also an artistand art historian and photographer.
And when I was a kid,I remember her turning the kitchen
into her darkroom where she wasdeveloping images that she was making.
And on occasion,I would either help her with that

(05:46):
or I would be making photogramswhere which are when you expose
light sensitive paper to
light with it with objects on top of themand create shapes
and I'm taking my G.I.
Joe's and putting them on thereand then bringing them to school.

(06:06):
It was really just so kind of a fun,early experimentation.
And I just think because my motherwas always so in love with photography,
it was really critical to everything I didand the way I saw the world.
Yeah.
Do you think that her also being an arthistorian was very influential
and in your creative process andthis sort of subject matter you explore

(06:29):
and I'm thinking about, you know,these sort of mass media, pop culture
images, marketing, that sort of thing,this sort of like critique of...
When I was a kid,
my mother worked at the Schomburg Centerfor Research in Black Culture in Harlem,
and she was the photo archivistand curator of photography and prints.
And so every day after school,I would go to my mom's job. And.

(06:52):
Somehow play in the stacks.
Literally play in the archivewith my friend Frankie
and Hankie and Frankie.
And so through osmosis ofjust being at my mom's job every day
with her lectures and talks and kind ofI remember seeing what James Baldwin
and Sugar Ray Leonard and I rememberthere was a time when Nelson Mandela came

(07:14):
there, like this was a timeand a place where and one of the few
places, frankly, where peoplefrom African descent all over the world
felt like they needed to come towhen they were in New York.
And our history was being preservedand shared there and nurtured there.
And so that really gave mea huge admiration

(07:35):
and love of the archiveand appreciation for it.
While I don't thinkI consciously appreciated it,
it was somethingthat was really embedded in me.
It's like home.
So speakingof home, let's go back to your beginnings.
You were born in New Jersey,grew up in New York.
How did that influence you as an artistand your perspective, your development?

(07:55):
And I also lived in Philadelphia andwent to high school in Washington, D.C..
So I got to live in multiple places
that had kind of different nuancesthat I found myself adjusting to.
I only lived in Jersey for two years,so I can't really speak to that.
But going from New York to D.C.

(08:15):
or from Philly to New York,
those were placeswhere the cultures were so different.
Even what it means to be Black inthose places was so different
to be a boy and that time
so different and I needed to,I got to navigate myself
and express myself as a different person,which meant that I could shift lenses

(08:36):
better than many other peoplewho were my age.
Yeah. And then.
So you stayed close to home to attendNYU or New York University?
Came back home.
My mom was stuckin D.C. as she called. Okay.
But then you
go west to study visual criticismand photography at the California
College of the Arts and San Francisco,where you earned a dual M.A.

(08:58):
and MFA in 2004.
So what was Hank like in those days?
Same weird person I also.
So I graduated from photographyand an Africana studies programs at NYU
in 1998, and in 2001those programs hired my mother.
So I like to said paved the way for her.

(09:19):
So even though I am
a nepo baby, I feel like it'sbeen a little bit of reciprocal thing.
Yeah, you give back.
And again,
I got to go fromI went to NYU, which was a massive school.
First I went to Duke EllingtonSchool of the Arts, which is primarily
African-American arts high school.
And I was in the museum studies program,which is like the laughing stock of any

(09:42):
art school, because they're like, whatare you guys doing there, papier-mâché?
Read articles.
And then.
We have one of the shout outto our museum studies program.
So that's at a university,this high school,
you know, dork city.
And then I went to NYU, whichI was in the photography and Africana

(10:03):
studies programs, but it was like NewYork was still kind of New York then
and it's kind of like waning,but it had some edge
and had this really cosmopolitanexperience there.
But it's a big school, big corporation,and then my mother told me
about her friend Chris Johnson,
teaching at this school called CaliforniaCollege of the Arts and Crafts
in Oakland.

(10:24):
And I just like, that's a dumb name.
So like 900 students, I was like,I should just go there.
And because I wanted to go somewherewhere I could,
yeah, it's like this is like,what do you do again?
Papier maché. Right?
That.
So they dropped the Cbecause they were tired of that.
And so now it's called CCA,But each of these places again,
I got thereand it was a different thing of me because

(10:47):
now I'm in this full arts environment,
has a craft history and collaborationis really integral to it.
And the politics in New York and also,frankly, the best thing about moving out
West was and the East Coast Black people
are the prodigal minorityand moved out west.
And I was like, well, we're like Forthand like learn about Cesar Chavez, Dolores

(11:08):
Huerta and like,you know, the Filipino movement,
the Chicano movement,you know, Japanese internment.
And I didn't know any about anything,any of this.
And I was like, Wow.
I guess there's more to American historythan chattel slavery. So
that was honestly, that really redefinedmy understanding of my own identity.

(11:29):
But I
also think I heard you say that you didn'twant to be an artist for a long time.
Is that right?
I still don't.
But you're kind of a prolific
maker, from what I understand.
Does it?
Is it a necessity?
Is it is it your employment?
Is it just things in your head?
You got to get out.

(11:51):
All those.
My favorite thing to actually dois to build community
and to collaborate with other peopleon what I call generosity projects
like Question Bridge and the Truth Boothand For Freedoms which or the Gun
Violence Memorial Project or the MonumentsTour or Writing on the Wall.

(12:12):
These are all projectsthat there is no money in it for me,
but I need to havemoney so that I can do them.
And the real
more rewarding than coming upwith something on my own
or even with a few people in the studioand putting it out in the world
and maybe sellingit is meeting a total stranger

(12:33):
who's willing to kind of open up theirheart and their life and their experience
to be a part of an artworkthat me and my friends are making.
It's way more fun to do somethinglike that and way more fulfilling.
And so when I think about my making
and most of what I spendmy time on is not stuff that people see,
which is kind of funnyto be considered prolific when it's

(12:56):
probably less than 50% of the things I do.
Right?
But if you know anything aboutmy mom, I'm a real slouch.
Well, I
think your mom is the hardestworking person I've ever met in my life.
It's like, well, she doesn't.
I think for her,there is no such thing as work.
She might complain about it or stress.
But like I've been saying

(13:17):
for at least 25 years, like,you don't really need to do this.
This is life for her.
She loves.
She's one of those people who loveswhat she does and that she like
chilling is like for her,like taking a fish out of water.
She's like, Let me just sit here.
And she would say she would like somethingdifferent, like she likes food or books.

(13:39):
But like, you know, even when she'swriting books, she's watching television.
She doesn't she can't. She doesn't.
There's no separation.
And as a as a professor, as a parent,
as a friend, as an artist, as a writer,
she's always she's completely in flow.
I'm going to do everything in my powerto not turn this into the Debra Willis

(14:01):
interview because, you know, she's a hugeshe's a huge influence on so many of us.
And obviously, she's a mentor to me.
She's so many opportunitiesthat she's given me shows, experiences.
And but I have to remember,when you gave her the award
at the National Conference for Societyfor Photography and Photographic
Education, and I, you know, besides thisincredibly beautiful and touching speech

(14:22):
you gave about your mom and sharingyour mom that she was always giving too.
Right?
And helping people and mentoringand creating opportunities for.
I was just shocked about how many students
came to honor herand the things that they said.
And I,
I just wanted to be like her
is that I was a young professorat that time, a young teacher.

(14:43):
I'm like, That's who I wanted to be.
Everyone keeps telling youto protect your time
and protect yourself and have boundaries.
And she was like the opposite of that.
She's like, I want to livea completely committed, giving life.
Right?
And it it upended what I thought
I should be doing in academiaand as an artist anyway.
And so. How does. That serve you?
Well, you know,

(15:04):
no one could be Deb.
But I, I definitely I'm
really glad I took that approachbecause life is much more filling.
I don't want.We spend most of our time at work, right?
So if you're not loving with itand like, committed to it
could definitely take over. So...
I’ll say as Sama’s colleague,she's incredibly generous
to her colleagues and her students. Well, I learned it from Deb.

(15:26):
You know, they say givers need takers.
The gift is actually in the receiving
of someone else desireto offer you something.
So oftenwe think that taking a selfish work.
No, no, no, no.
But we're oftenrejecting someone else's calling.
And when we don't receive those gifts.

(15:46):
And so and I know that for certain,I can say with my mom and other people
I witness and I say myself like, it'sgood energy when people validate
you by saying what you're offeringis worthy of my reception.
That's beautiful.
It's very beautiful.
Speaking of, speaking of giving,so you co-founded For Freedoms,

(16:07):
which is an artist led organizationand with collaborators, Eric Gottesman.
Am I saying that right?
Michelle Woo, and WyattGallery can tell us about For Freedoms.
What is it?
And yeah, so I've done a lot of differentcreative collaborations.
I've never really enjoyed the spotlight,I've never really like I'm
very socially awkward.

(16:28):
I always put my foot in my mouthand I'm not the best artist I know.
I have always been gregarious and curious.
I'm not the most courageous person I know,not the most thoughtful person I know.
And what collaboration gives me
an opportunity to dois to be more than myself.

(16:50):
So when I collaborate with another artist,another person, I get to be like,
oh wow, I would never go out and do this,or I would never
I would never take my time to do thisor I would never keep my mouth shut here.
That's what creative collaboration is.
I mean, it'smostly arguing about who's right,
but when you actually finish that,if you ever get anything done,

(17:13):
it's really beautifulbecause the things that we do
are not no one's full thing.
The problem, though, isthat we're in Western societies
obsessed with this concept of authorship
and there is nothingthat has ever been created
that was not a collaborationand I get way more credit than I deserve.

(17:35):
And my collaborationsand I've had probably 50 different
collaborators, most of whom,if not all of whom I'm still
good friends with or are like family with.
And For Freedom'sjust kind of the culmination
of all of these different projects.
And while I don't reallyand the other thing is
I also can'tstand the framework of founding,

(17:56):
even though I think it's rootedin in casting and sculpture.
But I think about founding islike I found it.
It’s something that feels reallypaternalistic and kind of colonial
about it, which, you know, colonialismkind of cool as a concept, but like,
I don't know, it just doesn't
feel right because, you know,it didn't begin with us.

(18:18):
We were some of the people
who were willing to like,put in a lot of the initial effort.
But I got most of the credit, sadly.
But my friend William James,who's an amazing artist and friend
about 25 years ago,
said he and he loved American footballand he said, let's play football.
And I'm terrible at sports.

(18:39):
But he created what they were callingthe Cam Booey Intergender
Interfaith Interracial Football League,
where in Brooklynand later in San Francisco,
we would, a bunch of mostly creativepeople who would play American football
and it was like rough touch, you know, and
but the point of the game was to keepplaying and forge a lot of great

(19:02):
relationships out of that Wyattand was part of the New York crew.
Eric was part of the the West Coast crew.
And Eric and I stayed in touchbecause we were in a book together
also with Wyatt and talked about politicsfrom time to time.
And he came to me and said he wantedto run me for office as an art project.

(19:25):
That's great.
Yeah, I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid.
So I was like, why don't you run?
Back and forth, back and forth.
And then we were like, well,we thought it was something curious about
how a lot of the same people who havethe excess capital to buy expensive
art have often had the same access capitalto buy expensive politicians.

(19:46):
It's true.
And it's kind of a hidden layer of that.
Like both art and politicsare full of wacky ideas and funny money,
and we kind of wantedto bring that together and realizing that
art and politics are part of a societythat we wanted
to forge something at the nexus of art,commerce, politics and education.

(20:08):
And we thought that we could do thatby just collaborating with people
we knew on campuses and in businessesand in galleries
and and artiststo kind of just talk about politics.
We realized that all art is political,like doesn't have to be you not to call it
political for it to be politicaljust by the nature of a person

(20:32):
making something that they hope willaffect another's, that's a political act.
And so we created what we were callingthe first artist-run Super PAC.
Ultimately, it was technicallynot the first artist-run Super PAC,
but we recognized that it was goodbranding.
We started in 2015,but we wanted to put critical discourse

(20:52):
into political discourseto refine our thinking, thinking that
what we know,what makes a great artist is critique.
Unfortunately, politiciansdo everything they can to avoid critique,
which means that growing, evolving,
challenging them is very difficultbecause they all have to be born perfect
and maintain their perfect veneer, whichactually doesn't allow any of us to grow.

(21:16):
And so Michelle Woowas my studio manager at the time,
and it was one of those thingswhere we kind of stopped doing that,
that kind of art, quote unquote,and started doing this
where we were like saying,what if we did billboards?
What if we did town hallsand we just started to like, go around
and ask people,would you like to, you know,

(21:36):
talk about your work in this context?
And as soon as you call it political,people think differently about it.
And and so we just went to museumssay, hey,
to do with a town hall about art politics.
And and so that led over the past decadefor us to us doing about
I think right now 800 billboardsacross the country with over

(21:59):
650 artists in all 50 states
plus D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and doing,
I think, 500 or more townhalls or activations over 200 exhibition
runs and really workingwith at least 10,000 people
to just really hopefully broaden

(22:19):
the conversationand bring nuance to political discourse.
And it's been fun.
I now they're a nonprofit,which I'm not a formal member of,
but everyone still thinks I'm in charge,which
I am always like,If they would listen to me.
You told me a little about the titleThe Freedoms...

(22:39):
Yeah.
So we were and I was really fascinatedwhen we started with Norman Rockwell's
paintings of FDR’s,Norman Rockwell made a series of paintings
as an attempt to kind of illustrateFranklin Delano Roosevelt's concept
that everyone was entitled toFor basic freedoms
and his January 6th 1941State of the Union address.

(23:01):
And he said everyone was entitledto freedom of speech,
freedom of worship,freedom from fear and freedom of want.
And I wanted to recreatethe Rockwell images
which were really famous like a familyeating a turkey at a table,
or peoplefrom different ethnicities praying.
But when I looked at these images,almost every

(23:23):
one of these images was a whiteAnglo-Saxon Protestant, presumably.
And there was like one Catholic personand it was like a Black woman
in the shadows.
in one of them and I recognized that theUnited States didn't look like that then.
The population, the faith andand it doesn't look like that now.
So I wanted to update
those For freedoms for the present momentand didn't know how to do it.

(23:47):
And so when we were like up with ideas,
Eric was like, well,what if we call it For Freedoms?
And we were like, It's like, okay.
And then he looked up www For freedomsdot com, F O U R freedoms.
And it was taken
he's oh but for freedoms isn’t.
Was likewe're for freedoms and we're like, okay.

(24:08):
Because we realized in orderto really be creative, we have to
imagine that there are freedomsthat we're not even thinking of now.
That will be thingsthat were For in the future,
and they're probably thingsthat we're against
now that we might even be for,and that we needed to embrace
duality, complexity,and not just us but everyone, right?

(24:30):
And so we it was kind of I mean, let'sjust take like how we did things.
That's kind of this is a plays in sort ofthe way you work with language and text.
It's kind of I mean, that's ahas a very specific back story.
But ...
You thought it was smarter.
Yeah. No, I think it'sI think it's smart still.
I mean, even if we get thereaccidentally as art is

(24:51):
and still smart,there's something subconscious happening.
A serendipity. Yeah.
The funny thing is, like,we didn't really know what we were doing.
We didn't know what a Super PAC was.
We just talked to our friendAlbert Ignacio,
who was also part of the footfootball crew.
I called him upand asked him to make a logo.
He made a logo and we filed the papersfor becoming a Super PAC,
which is like very simple, but we didn'treally know what a Super PAC was.

(25:14):
And then we told one journalistthat we were creating the first artist-run
Super PAC, and next thing you know, it'sin the New York Times.
People are writing about itand we're like, but you can just
say, put a logo and some signs and papers
and all of a suddenyou're an expert on like.
What are you going to do as a Super PAC,blah, blah, blah.
And our
the way the collaboration really tookhold, it became because it was like an art

(25:37):
project we really thought were going to gofor like two or three months
and in the answering of the questions,
we formulated what we were doing.
So are you going to do this?
You're going to you can do exhibitions.
Yeah, we're going to do visualabout working with this artist.
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like great.
Yeah, we're going to do that. Like,that's so.
So much of what happenedreally came in response

(26:01):
to people's assumptions based offof what they know that we didn't know.
So you were having a kind of a dialogand one of those,
you know,like we were actually collaborating
but collaborating with journalistsand the weird questions that they brought
that push truthis more interesting than fiction.
As a thesis,

(26:22):
the person with the questionusually is the person with the answer.
And so it's often a lot of our early workwas people would say, So
when we go to an institution, say,which we love to do a town hall with you,
and they're like, okay, great,where would you like to be about?
We'd be like, Well,what would you like it to be about?
And that from that discourse,something really exciting would come up.

(26:43):
You should be teaching methodologiesin art practice.
And just because that's that's brilliant.
How is this creative civic engagementimpacted you now?
There's so many ways it's impacted me.
We did some really, really cool things.
We did some really amazing things in 2018,we did this 50 state initiative,

(27:03):
which I mentioned where we started withbecause we weren't going to really
we were done like 2016,we did 14 billboards.
We probably did like 20 town halls.
And after the electionwe were in South Africa
for one of my mother's Black Portrait'sconferences and Wyatt came and is like,

(27:24):
guys, we'regetting all these really weird emails.
And it turns out that after the election,
people had seen a billboardthat we had done called Make America
Great Again with using SpiderMartin's picture
from the Bloody Sunday in 1965,
where on one sidethere's nonviolent civil rights activists,

(27:47):
and on the other side there are policewith batons pointing at them, giving them
a two minute warning to disperseand then subsequently brutalized them.
And people were like,whose side are you on?
You know, is this are you encouragingpolice brutality or are you saying that,
you know, you're callingthese cops racists and all of a sudden

(28:10):
there was like CNN was writing about itwith other periodicals.
It was like all of this controversy.
And they're like, well,people like, what are you going do next?
And like, we didn't.
And but we really what was fascinatingwas that CNN said
Mississippi residentsunsure of controversial billboards intent,

(28:32):
which really felt like a successas an artwork were.
We're like they they can put it in a box.
That's that's you knowand it sucks that like like
what does it mean to make Americagreat again is what the question was.
And I want toI think, an exhibition at MoMA
and saw some people standing outside of

(28:53):
like a friend board memberand the director and the board member
say her name is Sarah Harrison,who's now the chair of the board of MoMA.
When are you going to giveFor freedoms of residency?
And it was likeClaus was the director of the museum,
and he was like, well,how about what are you doing in January?

(29:13):
And we’re like, I called Eric and it waslike we just got offered a residency at
MoMA PS1.
What are we going to do?
And that was right before the inaugurationof President Trump in his first term.
And the builder had come down.
We preserved it.
We put that up in the galleryand like started to

(29:37):
that's when we're like,I guess we'll do a town hall and
people are like writing stuff on Post-itsand sort of put them on the wall.
And it was just like it just evolvedinto one of the dancers that decided to.
We knew that we were like,You guys want to do something
and modern dancers in the spaceand just put up random stuff.
I do want to share thisbecause while we were there, Peter Eley,
who was the curator who kind ofwas assigned to us with Oliver Schultz,

(29:59):
was talkingabout the history of modern art.
Alfred Barr, who was the first presidentof the Museum of Modern Art,
who was an evangelist for modern.
Modern art wasn't a thing,but modernism was still evolving.
And they it was just kind of an ideathat they were trying to prove.
And so MoMA would basically say,you want to be kind of like
with the coolness where, you know,they were saying like, this is modern art.

(30:23):
And so if you're in rapid Cityor in Lawrence, Kansas,
or if you're and Des Moines, Iowa, andyou want to be seen as up with the times,
you all should rent exhibitions from us
and they would lease out these exhibitions
to museums and galleriesall over the country.

(30:45):
And that's why you'll findsome of the most amazing in modern art.
There's a Jackson Pollock hereand you know, and a de Kooning,
I think in places where you're like,how did that even find its way here?
And it's because these fancy New Yorkerswere advocates for
because if you were an industrialistor you were rich and here
you wanted to be up with it, then,you know, I went to New York.

(31:05):
And so we were like, wait, well,how come we don't do that now in a way?
Like when his idea was that we should
we should be evangelists for political artand that we should think
about the interstate systemas our connecting routes.
And so
and we just said, okay, where do we knowpeople who work at museums or galleries?
And we realized we just made a listand there were like 80 people

(31:28):
that we just came up with immediately.
There were 35 states.
We called them up, were like,Would you like to do a project with us?
And that led to this 50 state initiativewhere we did
exhibitions, town halls and billboardsand all 50 states for the first time.
And most of the time our only content was,Do you want to do something with this?
Yep And a logo.
And that's what we called it,the largest creative

(31:49):
collaboration in the country,because it was literally just like that.
You know. Do youwe know anybody in Hawaii.
Do you know anybody Hawaii? Oh, yeah.There's this place.
And I say that because we takeso much is obvious.
But like, if we take it for granted thatmodern art is came from Paris to New York
and maybe was popular, but not someoneactually came up with the scheme

(32:10):
to make this importantbecause once New Yorkers said
it was important, other people did. That.
And so curious what there if you couldput us in the room of the town halls,
what were those like?
And, you know, the energy, the tenor,like what sort of transpired in them.
What we decided we were going to dothe town halls around the For Freedoms.
So there was a freedom of fear,
freedom of worship,freedom of speech and freedom from want.

(32:32):
And our friend Andrea Hickey,who was a curator at the Cleveland Museum,
came up to us and she's like, well,why don't you guys do
eight town halls here as a residency?
And this is like right around the sametime as the MoMA PS1 thing, right?
Okay.
And sheput us in touch with education people.
And so one example,the town hall about freedom of worship

(32:54):
that was really profound for mewas Eric and Megan Reich,
who was the director of educationthen, got on this kick about prison
and doing a town hallabout worship in prison.
And so they found an imam, a pastor,
and they brought for the townhall in this museum,

(33:16):
it was catered by 12 incarcerated women
who were in a programwith the Lutheran Church
and someone who taughtfaith in the prison,
someone who was wrongfullyincarcerated, a pastor.
And it was like magic, I mean, who talk,you know, that's one thing.

(33:36):
Like one of the women who was working,like she felt like she needed to get grab
the mic at some pointand she's like, yeah,
well, I got she basically got arrestedwhen she was nine months pregnant
and she had been in jail for seven yearsserving a nine year term.
So her child had never known her mother,their mother outside of prison
and talked aboutshe didn't have that much experience

(33:58):
with the things that she felt likeshe had learned really important lessons
through her experience in prison that weregoing to make her a better mother.
And it's like,you know, it was like, What?
What are you talking about? Like prisons?
And just and she was like,This is my life.
You don't get to tell me my story.
And some people are crying.It was amazing.
But like this, that kind of thing so much.

(34:19):
And more recently,Michelle has been really leading
a lot of conversation and collaborationshe did for Freedom's Congress.
And at Lachman,300 to 500 people a few months ago.
And it was really about healingand consciousness
and kind of connecting with ourselvesin a moment where we feel so rattled.

(34:41):
Right.
So it evolves.
Yeah. I
was wondering if you could tell usabout raise up
and maybe describe the workand then thinking about six months later,
I believe is when the whole Ferguson handsup kind of slogan comes into being

(35:06):
and how titles and moments in historyright
wind up reframe ing your workor making maybe assumptions
that people bring to the workor the way they think about it.
And, you know,whether that is an interesting serendipity
or maybe it's complex.
I was also thinking about the White Womanseries and also.
Unbranded a century of white womenfrom 1915 to 2015.

(35:29):
Right?
And it's a very specificI mean, it is a big project along
a series of work that you did beforethat it makes complete sense,
but that even the word white woman,I mean that title now white women sound
so different after the whole sort of Karenphenomenon we get in social media
and what it might be saying, you know,that has nothing.
I don't thinkit has anything to do with it,

(35:50):
although there might be some aspectsabout whiteness, right?
And how that gets sold and packagedand commodified and explained and,
you know, all the ideals of the powerin which
it's expressedthat white women can can take place.
I'd like to hear about both works,but I'd also like to hear
what happens in the aftermathwhen we change a society

(36:10):
and how it might reframe your workand you have a problem with that.
Or do you fight against thator do you embrace it?
I do my best to embraceand not to fight in all times.
I ...
In 2013, I made a work called
Raise Up, which was in South Africa.
I'd seen an image by Ernest Cole of minersbeing strip searched during apartheid

(36:34):
South Africa, and there's 13 menfacing a wall with their arms waist high.
And whenever I looked at the picture,I've always felt guilty
because I was always gawkingat their butts.
And it felt like it was like a weird thingto like
look at a picture that you're supposedto, like, take something from, but
really just be like
looking at people's butts.

(36:57):
And I felt awkward about that
and I wanted to make a work about that
and somehow I thought that I could bestdo that by
making a
recreation of the photographin sculptural form.
And so I kind of sliced an element of

(37:18):
of the photograph from their torsos up
and turned it into a sculpture.
I think with 13 bronze figures,that sculpture,
each figure was then ten inches tall.
So editing the partthat I felt uncomfortable about and rather
than naming it about
the miners, I just called it Raise Up.

(37:39):
I wanted to give it a different contextor give them empowerment.
And it's funny to think that those men
who inspired the work,not only the photographer, are
possiblystill alive or their children are.
I never thought about that.
And so it made the workI did in South Africa, and that was that.

(38:01):
And then I think I know that June 14,19 to 2014 or something around
the time was when Michael Brown was shotand killed in Ferguson, Missouri,
and that term, hands up, don't shoot,became a rallying cry.
And December that year, JackShainman Gallery
brought an edition of that workto Art Basel.

(38:22):
And someone maybe someone on Beyonce's
team maybe posted it somewhere.
And people are referring to itas the hands up, don't shoot piece.
And all of a suddenI was being asked to talk about this work,
which had changed context thatso I was talking about something
that happened, you know, six years ago

(38:44):
in one part of the country and anotherpart of the world, I should say, that
seemed to be speaking very eloquentlyto something
that would be happening in the future.
And that's when I started to really thinkabout artists as shamans, as time
travelers, that we live in a futurethat doesn't yet exist.
And so we can'twe can't be too emotionally invested in

(39:06):
any kind of response because we don't
if the artwork makes it out of our studio,
it will likely have a longer lifethan we do.
Right.
And so it may takea lot of different forms.
So does that answer that question.
Yeah, no, it was, that was great.
And unbranded century of white women.

(39:27):
I have a lot of like unpopular opinions
and one is that I don't believe in race.
I think it's a divide and conquer strategy
that whoever created the white raceprobably had it fixed for them to win.
And we are all
oppressed by the concept of racebecause it divides humanity.

(39:48):
And a divided humanity cannot be united.
And there's a presumptionthat white women have a privilege.
But I think white women quote peoplewho are labeled or label themselves
white and women have always beenin a vulnerable and precarious place.
They were not also includedas human beings
and were basically considered propertywhen this country was founded.

(40:11):
If they had any securityit was very tenuous.
Always.
And a lot of the brutalitythat others face
physically in their societythey had to endure psychologically.
And I was curious about thatin advertising, you know,
And when you start to think aboutlook at some of these images

(40:33):
of standards of beauty that a lot like,I would never
perhaps have been,
neither you would never assumethat you could fit fully into this
standard of beauty that many white womenfeel like they have to
in order to be enough.
And the confinements of thatand how it changes over time was something
I was really fascinated by.
So I wanted to track that in advertisingover the course of a century and saw this

(40:58):
amazing kind of evolution of this notionof femininity, this notion of whiteness
that became more and more complexuntil the 20th 21st century.
The work that preceded that,we had some of those works at the way
am I right now,the University of Arizona Museum of Art.
Those were wasthose taken from Ebony Jet magazine.

(41:18):
That that was called Unbranded Reflectionsin Black Corporate America
from 1968 to 2008.
And a lot of those basically in the laterpart of the civil rights movement
was the first time that Black peoplebecame seen as worthy citizens,
which really should be calledworthy consumers.
And so the way that advertising

(41:41):
started to represent people with browner
tones of skin was very different.
And I thought I should just track that.
And I chose 1968 because was the symbolicend of the civil rights movement.
This was in 2005.
And I just said, you know, 40 yearssounds like a good number,
not knowing that the weeks that I firstpresented at the Rubell Family Collection

(42:05):
in December 28,just a few weeks after Barack Obama
had been elected president in 2005,nobody knew who Barack Hussein Obama was.
And again, there was a momentwhen something that was just being made.
And so in this series,I took in that case two ads for every year
and removedall the advertising information.

(42:25):
And so once you remove the logosand the copy, you start to see the image.
And it's usually pretty curious.
There'ssome really beautiful images that I was.
Did you learn much about the photographersof that era
that hard to sort of decipher?
They didn't knowon aren't normally credit. Right.
Not an advertisement but but also.

(42:46):
But Todd Grayis there's a jungle fever poster
that's said under the artist named ToddGray who who I've known for a long time.
One timeI was talking to him, and he was like,
So yeah, you used my picturefor that project.
Which picture?
And he was like that one, Oh.
that's amazing.
So I believe I heard you say once that
when you take the advertising informationand all the text information out,

(43:09):
you don't even like the images, don'treally relate to what they're selling.
You don't even know what they're sellingright.
You didn't elaborate a little bitmore on that?
Once removed. Yeah, advertisingis never really about the product.
It's about what ideas and generalizationsyou can get people to buy into
through the manipulation with the text
and the seduction of the imagery. And

(43:31):
when you remove it, you realize thatwhat's really for sale
is the assumption
of a valueof a certain type of an identity.
And when we market to a specific, quote
unquote demographic,we have to bring prejudice.
We're like, okay,
these kind of people careabout this kind of stuff,
so we're going to talkto this kind of way.

(43:52):
And I love seeing that prejudice revealed
because if I can understand it,that really reveals my own prejudice.
Right?
And I think what I was really when I sawthat work, actually, I think it was
at the collection,came to the Tucson Museum of Art and.
The Americans.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I saw a huge number of those images.
And what I was always thinking,I took my class to there,

(44:13):
We studied it togetherand talked about it together.
But what I was really curious about wasbecause these are advertisements, right?
And some of these, if there were magazinessuch as Ebony and Jet,
those are Black-owned magazines,but the advertisers are selling products
that maybe they're sellingto both Black and white audiences, right?
Does the phrase “You've come a long way,baby” mean anything to you?

(44:35):
I know it, but I can't place it.
Virginia Slims.
Oh yeah. I'm your age.
Or maybe a few years older than you.
So I remember it just too young.
You don't remember cigarette ads probably.
The camel ones,I remember those, the camel cartoons.
Yeah.
But what about the Marlboro Man?
I only know that throughstudying the history of advertising.

(44:57):
I don't think I grew up seeing it. Well,what was fascinating ...
If you like the way they sold cigarettesto presumably
white men was with rugged
hardcore doing rough stuff,the same product
being advertisedto women of various ethnicities.
It was about progress and eleganceand being forward.

(45:22):
You know, that'syou've come a long way, baby, you know.
And then there Newport cigarettes whichwere marketed often to African-Americans.
The ads would say Alive with Pleasure.
And so it's like Blackpeople are just having a great time.
And sometimeswithout cigarettes at all in the ad.
And so so it was really fascinating
to see how one product can,you know, like it.

(45:43):
What does it say about the product really,that you can It's the same thing.
It's put a different picture,a different name on it,
and you talk to a differentaudience in a different way.
Do you think you'll ever pick it up again?
I would like to, but advertisinghas changed so much since then, right?
Like print ads are not the dominant formof advertising any more.

(46:04):
While it's still popular,it's become so much more insidious because
rather than corporations creating imagesto sell products, they've figured out
how to convince us to sell ourselvesso that they can sell products to us.
Yeah, that's.
Well, I think that really takes us to theAI question that we've

(46:26):
all been interested in asking you about,
you know, how AI functionswith proliferation of images
that exist on the netand whether they're from artists
or they're from Instagramor whether however they've come to be.
And you,
are you curiousabout using the technologies
since you have worked with a huge swathof like

(46:48):
popular media and images and archives,Is this something
that you find fascinatingor do you find it problematic?
I know even
finding something problematicmight be interesting as an artist, right?
Yeah, well,I've done things with AI imaging.
What I feel like an ancient person,
but I feel a little bit heartbroken.

(47:09):
Not because of AI, but because of what
the advent of AI image generation
means for the archives.
Like, the truth,there is never truth in photography,
but the truth of a documentedimage means nothing anymore.
Because there can now be images madethat 95% of people

(47:33):
will presume were authenticfrom a certain period.
They're completely fabricated.
And so what's the use of using a quoteunquote real image from that?
Like, what's the currency of that?
Like, imaginewhat a images can make of Bob Marley.
And maybe if with a savvy outlet,

(47:54):
recreate the whole story of who he isand what he was about and what they expand
of Martin Luther King, I'm like,
what is going to happen to the historythat we know in images
when virtually anyone can create an imagethat appears authentic?
I mean, sorry, it's just crazy.
Like there was a thing that was liketrending on social media about of Malcolm

(48:16):
X talking about racial justice,about violence, like listening to it
and I was like,this does not sound like Malcolm X.
This sounds way too woke
and not in a good way, but, you know,like,
it's just like, it's like somethingjust sounds off because Malcolm
X was not trying to be friendlyand he wasn't trying to go.

(48:39):
I think he was trying to like he wasn'tpleading for someone to care about,
you know, us as people like.
And so I looked at like and I looked it upand as like
he never said, but also like
there was no no one would ever like me.
I know.
Because, like,I've listened to his speeches, I,

(49:00):
you know, I'm familiarwith the tenor of his way of speaking,
but no one else would know that.
And that co-option of such a powerfuland piercing orator
into like a 2020s social
justice lens to me was heartbreaking.
Not because I don't support the values,but because it steals

(49:24):
the authenticityand the power of what he was saying.
You know, because someone's like,My voice doesn't matter.
I'm going to use someone else's voicejust to push my agenda.
Who would never say that. Anyway I'm that.
So so I mean, I'mI think it is cool, but I'm scared.
Yeah, I, I'm a little freaked out, too.

(49:45):
Yeah, well, I think of the differences.
You know, your work is, you know, yourappropriating images re-contextualizing
whereas I the as you're talking aboutis fabrication, right?
There's an erasure of authenticity,which is terrifying.
Which photography has always
been, has never been an authentic momentof captured photography
because it's only a split second of timeand narrow angle of you.

(50:08):
Where to dimensions.
There's no smell.
So I always know that photography is fake,and so I don't mourn that.
I just am concerned about how
people can be used in very much more
insidious ways than ever before.
Did you ever probably know that?

(50:30):
That's kind of ...
Yeah.
The current conflict about artistsprotesting that there's
going to be a big auction of AI workand because the work is being
the AI work is coming from artist’sown projects.
Right.
And without authorshipor without any attribution
and someone that workswith appropriated material, how do you
does that have a concern for youor do you feel like there's

(50:52):
too much control and power that artiststry to exercise over their work anyway?
I think there's multiple sides of it.
I think artists arealways going to be exploited
and the
.0001percent of us that can make a living of it
are just lucky, not not more talentedor more deserving than anyone else.

(51:15):
I had my mom bragging for me like
I'm a I'm a nepo baby,
but I think I come from a culture,
a generationthat kind of created the remix right.
Like the music that I became
most most familiar with wasn't musicthat was the original music.
It was uncredited.

(51:36):
Re application of a certain
sound to a new agenda.
And that's basically what's happening.
Yes. It’s hip hop.
You know, and but what happened in 1994is that hip hop
got corporatizedand stopped being hip hop, right?
So I think 30 years later,we're going to see that with

(51:59):
visual image images,you know, it'll be a shadow
of its former self,but perhaps still useful.
Fascinating
thinkingabout this idea of change and evolution.
I actually want to go back to somethingthat you were talking about earlier.
The curriculum at the CaliforniaCollege of the Arts and Crafts.

(52:22):
Was there any sort of craft practicesthat were being taught
And I'm asking you thisbecause I want to ask a question
about the quilt making
that you've been getting into recentlyand your work on quilts.
Yes theredefinitely was a fabric department.
There is a ceramics department.
There was a jewelry making department.
I took classes in none of those.

(52:42):
I was mostly in the darkroom and thendoing visual critical studies things.
But the spirit of the arts and craftsmovement was very, very much alive.
And but my photographer, my professorsJim Goldberg, and Larry Salton,
two of my professors, along with Chris,were really instrumental for me
because they were challengingthe conventions of photography.

(53:06):
I'm talking about personal life,
talking about bringing Texans of imagesand using archives.
That was really exciting to meand that influenced me.
The quilts were really justa few minutes ago, I came to
I went to the archives at CCPand one of my mother's quilts
is in the collectionas a quilt with photographs sewn into it.

(53:28):
And it's called Daddy’s Ties,and it's my grandfather's ties
and some of his pins from his lifetimethat my mother, after he died
with some of my aunts, sew togetherto make these these quilts.
And so justI just got to touch my grandfather's.
I mean, they let me talk.
They said they didn't seeme touch it, but they let me

(53:49):
touch my grandfather's ties.
And that's the Centerfor Creative Photography.
The CCP,which acquired this work in your mom.
Do you know what year?
1992, two yearsafter my grandfather died or.
I don't know. That's what it says.
But. So family history, Legacy. Yeah.
And now your work is across the way.
The quilts, you know,it's got a strong tradition.

(54:09):
And in African-American culture,it's got narratives and stories in it, yet
it's full of symbology and the flags,also the memorial to your cousin.
And I think you could tell us a little bitabout your cousin
because it's such a major impact onyou and your work
and then thinking about memorialsand memorialization.

(54:30):
And I think about the quiltingespecially I'm thinking about the big AIDS
memorial Quilt projectthat really is a kind of counter memorial
to subjects that people didn't really wantto be talking about and about deaths,
the victims that were being erased
and not being seen in our newsand by our politicians.
And that really gave voice to their loss,commemorating their lives.

(54:51):
And were thinking about thatwhen you were making your works?
I was thinking about the AIDS quiltwhen I part of my genesis to For Freedoms
and Question Bridge and everythingI think about Act up in Grand Fury.
When I got into branding and advertisingbecause they were some of

(55:12):
the most effective artistskind of appropriating
popular culture, languageand advertising to talk about
human rights through the form of gayliberation and health care,
through the activismfor in the fight against AIDS.
So the quilts themselves were definitelymore connected to my grandmother,
Kippy Stroud,who founded the Fabric Workshop and Museum

(55:36):
in Philadelphia, kind of wasone of the first people got into my work.
And that's kind of how I became interestedin making quilts, not thinking.
Again, I always thought I was original,so I didn't think about my mom's quilts.
Then, Oh, maybe I'll make a quilt.
My cousin sometimes.
Well, this was my best friend,big brother figure,

(55:58):
and he was murdered on February
2nd, 2000 in Philadelphiawhen he was visiting my grandmother.
And my life plan upuntil then had been really just to follow
in his footsteps because he was a personwho was good at everything.
And that narrativeI the person who was the opposite of that.
But he always looked out for me and reallykind of nurtured me and cared for me,

(56:20):
even though a lot of other peoplethought I was not, I was not noticeable.
And all of a sudden I was kind of pushedto the forefront in my our family dynamic
because we were only boysin our kind of collective of cousins.
And I felt likeI needed to carry on his legacy and

(56:40):
honor him and his kind of
I mean, he was smoothand kind of gregarious and easygoing
and cool and fun and goodlooking and tall, good at sports.
I'm not going to say anythingabout me, but let's just say
what I could do.
But I say arguably as well as him was lovepeople

(57:05):
and express that and show it.
I don't think that as eloquently as hedid, but his one of the things that he,
a friend of his gave me recordingafter he died of him,
like singing on a microphone,just playing around.
And it said one of the last things onthat recording is love of rules,
him saying that.
And that became kind of my motto,my mantra,

(57:26):
and something that I am often compelledto put into art form
and public space and hopefully in people'shearts and minds.
Yeah, I saw the project,the Gun Violence Memorial, I mean.
The Gun Violence Memorial Project.I got that one right.
I was like one of the mostmoving experiences I ever had.

(57:47):
And I actually took photosand sent it to your mom.
It must be really hard to.
I mean, I know it'syour you're holding him in your heart.
You're doing all this work,but you're always having to share him
with the public that doesn't know him.
Is that is that does that feel good ordoes it feel hard some time that you're?
Does it keep ...

(58:07):
I felt exploitative for the first,let's say, 5 to 10 years.
Like most,a lot of what I was doing was based up
with commodifying my own family's pain,but not necessarily commercially,
but like I was very aware of that, thatrelationship to like my cousin's murderer
and slave to my books

(58:27):
or pictures of himor my aunts mourning that that was weird.
Or was it a watch or a necklace of histhat was?
Someone robbed him for nothing.
Actually, they robbed some other peoplethat he was with for their necklaces.
Yeah, but they didn't.
Those guys ran awayand my cousin had nothing of value on him,

(58:49):
so they just shot himin the back of the head.
Made him less the face downthen shot him in the back of the head.
But now I I think about how many peoplehave been shot and killed in this country
since Songha was killed,which is over a million.
I mean, I mourn for all those people,
all the family members, and see myselfas just, you know, a drop in the

(59:11):
in the ocean of people who've lost shed
tears to people who have lost their livesto gun violence in the United States.
But that's just withinthe imaginary borders of this nation.
Right.
But if you go south of this borderto to Mexico or go to Brazil,
you know,these numbers are also heartbreaking.

(59:37):
So I just see myself as beingevery time I get to say his name,
I hope I know my his mother,my aunt Lesley just
she gets to remember, I mean, he'ssomebody that's worthy of remembering.
And like, even his,the anniversary was just not too long ago.
And his high school roommate, they were inboarding school just wrote me.

(01:00:01):
And, you know,his memory is still very much alive.
And those of us who are still livingand it's fun to reflect on that.
Yeah, I understand why you use the word
the commodifying of your family's pain,but I think
I also think you'rehonoring the fact that that pain exists

(01:00:22):
and, you know, someone also lostsomeone close to me.
I, I really, I really was very moved. So.
So thank you for that workand thank you for sharing it.
And I think we'll leave it there.
Thank you so much for
visiting us in the studio and coming downto the southwest, to Tucson.
And we hope you take your kids outto the Desert Museum tomorrow

(01:00:44):
and like to have you back anytime time.
I hope to be back.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for joining Race Remix today.
This episode is made possible throughthe generous donations of our sponsors
and the efforts of our team of students,staff, faculty and community partners.
If you enjoyed this conversation,listen to more episodes at Race Remix

(01:01:08):
Arts dot Arizona dot Edu.