"Hank Willis Thomas knows how to hold a paradox in his arms and make it shine. Jack Shainman Gallery's newly opened Tribeca flagship presents I AM MANY, Thomas' eighth exhibition with the gallery, bringing together large-scale sculptures; retroreflective, lenticular, and textile works; and a group of mixed-media assemblages. Across these forms, Thomas continues his investigation into the myriad ways the past and present remain interwovenhow legacies of exploitation and oppression echo alongside emergent architectures of community and solidarity."
"Last Friday, before sculpture or slogan, there was a soundless flash in my chestthe kind that retroreflects history back at you and leaves no place to hide. The room was still, and yet my body started shaking loose what it had stored: the slow bruise of inheritance, the tug-of-war between overcoming and regression, the ache that arrives when you realize the wound is older than you are and somehow still warm."
"For over two decades, Thomas has built a conceptual language fluent in photography, sculpture, screen printing, installation, and video. He does not merely cite the archive; he metabolizes it. Iconic photographs of protest and resistancethose indelible, over-reproduced images that risk calcifying into textbook wallpaperbecome oxygen in his practice, refitted for the present tense. What unites the work is his insistence on the multivalence of history, the way meaning refracts depending on who is looking, when, and under what light."
Large-scale sculptures, retroreflective, lenticular, and textile works, and mixed-media assemblages populate I AM MANY, linking past and present through reconfigured archival imagery. The exhibition interrogates legacies of exploitation and oppression while foregrounding emergent architectures of community and solidarity. Thomas repurposes iconic photographs of protest and resistance, transforming over-reproduced images into present-tense oxygen for contemporary reflection. The title work references the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike's I AM A MAN and extends the phrase into new typographic and visceral iterations. The show operates as a circuit of images and gestures that elicit embodied memory and provoke emotional responses, surfacing inherited wounds alongside possibilities for collective resilience.
Read at www.amny.com
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