Root to Rise: Hank Willis Thomas on Art, Identity, & Wellness
This interview is part of the Root to Rise conversation series hosted by Jacy Cunningham in February 2021, which explores the role wellness plays in activists’ lives as they work to uplift their communities and make history. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, but you can watch the full conversation below on YouTube.
Jacy
Today's guest is Hank Willis Thomas. He's one of my favorite humans in the world. I adore his art; I adore everything about him. I'm very excited to get the conversation going with him about everything that he has going on and his life and his history, his past. He's got so much juice so we’re gonna squeeze it today. We're gonna take a sip today and we're going to enjoy a conversation that I think deserves to be had.
“...Everything that you do is art. Our lives are art.”
Your talk actually inspired me to look at my work, my craft, in a new light. Because you said basically everything that you do is art. Our lives are art. So I began to look at fitness and wellness as art. I began to look at the way in which I delivered the wellness experience or fitness, so that catalyzed a lot in my life and changed the game for me, so I just want to thank you for that.
Hank
Thank you. The way that you approach it is actually really inspirational.
Jacy
You actually made me stay in Portland an extra day to go see your exhibit. I had never seen it up close and personal. Man, I was just floored. For me, it's always about how you bring history into a better understanding of today. You take history and you place it into these photographs and you edit them in a way that makes us realize our deep connection from here to then.
Growing up in a family of artists, your dad was a Black Panther member and a jazz musician. I just want to get a little brief history about that. Growing up in a home with a mother who was a professor, an artist, a photographer, historian, and also growing up in the same home with a Black Panther. How was that experience for you?
Hank
They all did many, many things and I lived in many places. I presume your parents are probably maybe a little bit younger than mine, but they're of, I think, the first generation of Black Americans who had a crack at freedom. They actually were able to make choices in their lives that might not absolutely be squelched or squandered by white supremacy and the structure of racism in our country. A few people got lucky and were able to veer off the path. I think I got to see my parents really follow their dreams and a lot of people from their generation. It was just awesome to see people imagine things that hadn't been done.
My mother’s written dozens of books on Black photographers going back to the 1840s. My dad was producing films in Hong Kong and things like that. I was really fortunate just because they didn't play by the rules, so I never even learned the rules. That's really hard, but also helpful at times in my life.
Jacy
I read a recent fact or a statistic that said that less than 10% of art that's in exhibits in the United States is by Black people here in the country. Being that you have succeeded in so many different ways within your industry, within that whole entire world of art, how did you really do it? What would you say was a key ingredient to you achieving beyond what people really saw that you could do?
“When you have an irrational idea of what you’re capable of, things that most people would think are out of their reach become right in front of you.”
Hank
As my father said to me, "Hank, you know I've always had an irrational idea of what I was capable of." When you have an irrational idea of what you're capable of, things that most people would think are out of their reach become right in front of you. You're like, “Well I'll just grab it.” You run the risk of looking aloof and not self-aware or maybe even arrogant at times, but you also reap the benefits of not holding yourself back. Someone else to hold me back is one thing, but if I'm holding my own self back, I'm not going to get anywhere.
Jacy
In 2012, you produced Question Bridge. It's a three-hour documentary. I can't tell you, I cried for two hours. Coming from a private school community, growing up in a very militant home but also having such a diverse access to so much growing up, I was always confused a little bit. Identity — What am I? Who am I? How do I show up in the world? The Question Bridge showed me that I wasn't alone in those questions. That as a Black man in America, I wasn't alone at all in those questions. It formed this connectivity to the human aspect outside of the categorizations that we buy into. I don't know how many brothers you interviewed, but their questions were so beautiful. And their answers, and seeing the bridge between generations. What prompted you to create that?
Hank
Collaboration is a major part of my work and my life. One of my professors actually, when I was in graduate school, his name was Chris Johnson. He had done a project in the '90s called Question Bridge, where he was looking at different class divides in the African American community and thinking about how there was a time during segregation where if you were Black, you primarily shared the same experience. After integration, there were divides. Political divides and cultural divides and value divides. There was not as much space for people to actually communicate across the divides.
He thought that maybe by taking a video camera to these different people and asking them to ask questions of people who they thought were different from them, the camera would be the bridge and the question would be the bridge. The question would be the bridge but the camera would be the vehicle.
I saw that, and about 10 or 12 years later as an African American man, I don't know not only who I am but...they say there's a Black male perspective. I came to realize it's not a coincidence that when said correctly, it's blackmail — that our identities are all fraud. For many of us African American men, it's actually been a form of enslavement where we have to wear this mask and take on this idea of a Black male identity and not even get to really find out who we are as you talked about.
We thought that we would ask African American men, self-identifying, to ask and answer each other's questions. Through that, we would be able to see the diversity that exists within any demographic because really we're just all human beings. We would go in there with our own prejudices. And then they'll ask a question and we were like, “Whoa.” And the answers would always be as enlightening.
Jacy
I suggest everyone that's watching this, please look up Question Bridge. If there's anything that I learned from that entire three-hour documentary, it was that once again, we are so tapestried within Blackness. Within what they say is a Black man are all these iterations, all these different narratives, all these different upbringings, all these different educations. We always form this melting pot of Blackness. "Yeah you're Black, you should just be like this."
And that's why I think there is a struggle right now, a lot of the time with the children that we're raising and what they are able to do, because there's still that funnel that we put them through. Do this and be this so that you can be safe and protected in the world. As an artist, how do you, from an artist perspective, how would you see the Black community or just the world in general embracing this revolution of not just love, but the revolution of waking up? Of tuning up into an understanding of the world and our humanity within it? Because I feel like we get so caught up in the identifications, we defeat our own humanity.
Hank
The first question it comes back to is, what color is your hat?
Jacy
Black.
Hank
What color is your skin?
Jacy
Black. Well, brown.
Hank
You see, that's how hard it is for us to see ourselves. I'm constantly trying to remind myself that I'm not what I am told that I am. The question is then who am I? What I hope I do in my work is challenge these frameworks of what we're told happened. We're told who we are and who's important and who's not. And then encourage myself and the viewers to ask those questions so that we can get to actual freedom and liberty, which is recognizing that within each of us is a rainbow.
All I know about myself right now is what I can see in front of me. This idea that an external thing that other people see is me is not true — it's what they see. Race has always been a projection. When I think about the next generations, I strongly believe that they will not be afraid to see that we are a multitude of colors, but the colors don't even begin to crack at who we really are. Some people say I don't see color. It's like, no, I see a bunch of colors and I want to get in closer and closer so I can see even more. So that's what I'm hoping to help us get on the path to doing.
Jacy
This idea from the first interview I had was with Ty Hobson-Powell, who's an activist from DC, and we talked about radical love. As someone who has gone to Burning Man and has seen a different form and expression of love in such a unique way, you did an exhibit where you did an art installation at Burning Man with the Afro pick. When I think of art, I think of it triggering emotion, triggering some type of feeling or something that you have to deal with. What you've done has done that time and time again. But I have to ask you this, how was that installation received at Burning Man?
Hank
I grew up in New York but also in North Philadelphia, and I went to high school in DC, all having large Black populations. When I was a kid, the Afro pick was as normal as...it was...life. To be able to build a monumental 25-foot Afro pick and then put it out in the middle of a desert where very few Black people have ever stood was insane. My collaborator Marsha Reid, also known as Disco, has really been the one who's been steering that ever since, so it's been traveling all around the country. At Burning Man, I believe it was transformational for them and also for a lot of people who saw it and got to climb up inside it. I'm just hoping that it continues.
Jacy
I love it. Now of course this conversation is called Root to Rise, and we want to always connect back to the root. The root being wellness, the root being the practices that keep us or help us sustain our levels of success. What are the things that help you, from more of a wellness standpoint, create all these things? As someone who is well-achieved, what do you do on a daily basis or what do you do on a regular basis that helps you maintain yourself?
Hank
Well would you believe I didn't really think about that until the pandemic. I would exercise, I would meditate every once in a while. Obviously do yoga and other things. But there was a moment around this time last year where people all over the world started to become hyper-aware, more mindful of every breath, and also the quality of every breath. I don't think we'll ever go back to not being grateful for having air in our lungs.
I've started to really embrace meditation on a different level and understand exercise in a very different way. But also gratitude. I haven't hugged my grandmother and she's 99. I haven't hugged her in a year. I'm trying to do it before she turns 100. I've been living with a different perspective on what's important and what I'm really here for than I did before. I'm here to be thankful and share my gratitude.
Jacy
As an artist, as someone who does practice wellness nowadays over the pandemic, what has been a creative inspiration that you've gotten from your practice? Because I think for me, when I work out or sweat or do anything, I'm always inspired directly after. I'm like, there's the juice. It's what fuels my creativity. Now that you've shifted into a deeper understanding of what wellness means to you and inviting different practices, have you had new inspiration?
Hank
I've been blessed to be part of a community that was actually launched to the public formally a year ago today, February 25th, called the Wide Awakes. We were in Trinidad Carnival and inspired by something that happened 161 years ago, which was today. This guy named Cassius Marcellus Clay came to Hartford, Connecticut. Guy from Kentucky. He was an abolitionist, which was a dangerous position in 1860 as a White aristocratic abolitionist. And this group of regular people gathered around him to decide they were going to be his bodyguards. They carried torches and they wore capes to make sure the wax wouldn't fall on them. Everyone thought they were so cool that they started to mimic it and they were known as the Wide Awakes. They went from six people on this day 161 years ago to upwards of 100,000 people doing parades and rallies for emancipation and basically chose a candidate from Kentucky to become their president.
“This idea that you could use joy and collective action to shape the country and shape the world, shape the future, is something that I’ve been really inspired by.”
This idea that you could use joy and collective action to shape the country and shape the world, shape the future, is something that I've been really inspired by. I saw the Wide Awakes mobile soup kitchen was here where they've been doing meals, giving away meals to thousands of people since the election day. And others across the country have just been banding together and being like, “Let's just do stuff and contribute to this great awakening that the world is having and broaden our perspectives so that we don't go back to this narrow ‘It's me, I have to do this. They are over there, I am over here,’ mentality that we got so accustomed to in the rat race that we have been out of for a large part in a way for a while.”
Jacy
I agree. I think we have been reduced to this us-versus-them mentality a lot of the time. Seeing the world want to wake up, seeing people want to invest in certain types of knowledge that they never invested in before. Seeing people seek different resources of knowledge and information. For me, it excites me. As someone who people typically don't understand fully because they see the exterior and they get caught up in that, I've been digging into my own history bank and trying to discover new ways of understanding where we are today and how we can shape a new narrative for what we want to do and what we want to become.
“Regardless of where we may be or what the situation is, there’s still an opportunity to express joy, there’s still an opportunity to be grateful and to have gratitude for just having another day.”
Because I think joy, as you say, is such a key ingredient in freedom. I think what I always try to express every single day is joy because regardless of where we may be or what the situation is, there's still an opportunity to express joy, there's still an opportunity to be grateful and to have gratitude for just having another day. Having legs, having fingers.
I want to go into For Freedoms. Why did you create the For Freedoms collective? What was your vision for that?
Hank
On another auspicious day on January 6th, 80 years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech where he said that everyone was entitled to four basic freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. That became the inspiration for what we now call human rights — this idea that everyone is entitled to certain rights. But what we also know is that same president who led us into a war that saved millions of lives was also partaking in a system of apartheid on millions of his own citizens. He also imprisoned tens of thousands of Japanese Americans and many other things that are not as heroic. These ideas that he fought for and contributed to the world continue to bear fruit.
Back in 1940, 1943, largely to be American, that meant that you were White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and probably a man. We thought that we should revisit and reimagine Norman Rockwell's version of FDR's Four Freedoms in a much more heterogeneously empowered way. So we started to think about what the 21st century Americana looks like. Instead of doing four different versions of them, we did 82. Instead of being F-O-U-R freedoms, we are F-O-R Freedoms, because we are for freedoms that have yet to be imagined, and we must be if we want to move optimistically into the future.
Jacy
I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for creating what you created. Thank you for putting all of this into the world because it makes us question our very existence. It makes us question why we're here. It makes us question what we're doing with our lives. That's such an important question and that's such an important reason why art exists — to help us question life.
Lastly, your legacy. What do you want your legacy to be? For me, my legacy is that I want to leave a legacy of love. What do you want your legacy to be?
“No one is more special than anyone else. When we realize that, we recognize how special we all are and how much power each and every person has.”
Hank
I want it to be down to earth. No one is more special than anyone else. When we realize that, we recognize how special we all are and how much power each and every person has. I want to be seen today and also in the future as a human being who was not afraid to do all that they could do to improve the lives of themself and everyone around them.