Creating Public Places for Memory and Mourning

I am Hank Willis Thomas. I am a person. I have been professionally referred to as an artist.

I always choose to introduce myself as a person, and rarely as an artist, because I believe that one day, someone seeing me as a person just might save my life.

I hope you are safe. I hope you are among loved ones. I hope someone has told you recently that they love and appreciate you. If they haven’t, I’m here to tell you that you are appreciated.

I’ve been deeply invested in the idea that public space can and should be for everyone, and that what this means should always be under serious consideration. The spaces we create and the ways we talk about them shape our lives.

I had the great fortune of attending high school in Washington, D.C., where memorials and monuments are all over the city. That was where I discovered the power and potency of declaring a space where people can gather and reflect on moments in time, events, people, and ideas that, at their best, can be unifying.

One of the many lessons I learned is how those spaces change meaning over time, as we gain more information and distance.

Much of what I do, as a person working to survive and develop tools for survival, is try to create orientation markers for myself and others.

I was able to install a 22-foot sculpture called Unity at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a very simple sculpture: a bronze arm pointing toward the sky.

There is something about it that resonates deeply. That became crystal clear to me when the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery rose to the forefront of our collective consciousness.

People rallied around that sculpture as a gathering point. Across racial, ethnic, gender, generational, and class divides, people gathered around it and called for unity.

There is another sculpture called All Power to All People, a 24-foot Afro pick. It was made in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg and other artists of the mid-20th century who used everyday objects to ask us to reconsider our values, what we find important, and the surreality of our lives.

For some reason, people often struggle to find the joy in Black power. Black power is inclusive. When we embrace Black power, we can actually find liberty and justice for all.

I’ve also been thinking about people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who used their love for one another as a tool to inspire affirmative civic action around the world.

One of the pieces currently being made is a memorial to them called The Embrace. It will be installed on Boston Common, the oldest public park in the country.

The sculpture is based on a photograph of them embracing after Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What touched me in that photograph was the reality, so obvious in the image, of how much her strength carried and supported his weight.

The image of their arms interlocking, these two figures becoming one, became a metaphor that took on new meaning for me. I feel that we need to pay greater homage in our public spaces to the idea of coming together.

Much of what we know about ancient cultures comes from the art they left behind, the ideals they expressed, their brilliance, and their courage to bend reality to their collective will.

I don’t know whether all of it was good or bad. I know that human beings made these things, and that we will forever be proud of them.

As a human being, I hope to be part of a generation and a society that future generations will be proud of, and that future generations will even exist because of.

When I think about healing and memorials, I think about the scars in our hearts, the scars on our planet, and the scars in our psyches that need to heal.

We cannot imagine or create the world we want without trying to heal ourselves. We cannot heal others if we have not come to terms with the traumas of the past and found a way to let them go, work through them, or perhaps even appreciate them.

I say all of that to say that we are living through an epic, perhaps biblical, historical moment. People will reflect on where we were, how we survived, whether we survived, what we did, how we responded, and how we changed.

This is an opportunity.

With all that being said, I have a lot of work to do.

I hope something I said connected with you, or connects with you somewhere down the line. I hope you pay it forward. I hope you and I get to share air together someday.

I wish you well.