I had let my membership at the Portland Art Museum lapse. Too much of the programming was, at best, not particularly interesting, at worst, block-buster annoying. I guess I’m not the kind who is fascinated by the history of luxury cars….

That said, there are always exceptions, some truly terrific exhibits slated, and I have always tried to report on those. Currently on show is an exhibit by 43-year old Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas called All Things Being Equal…” I am happy to join the seemingly universal chorus of admirers singing the praises of this retrospective of profound work.

The reviews, for the most part, focus on much of what you expect about contemporary conceptual art dealing with issues of racism, sexism, violence and, yes, capitalistic oppression and exploitation. The New York Times tries to make it all about personal experience motivating art, the Guggenheim artist description focusses on “issues of identity, politics, popular culture, and mass media as they pertain to American race relations” which reappear in many evaluations of the current show, more or less verbatim (and with the word “intersection” frequently added…. ) Essays on art websites hone in on Thomas’ self description as a visual cultural archeologist. There is Cameron Hawkey’s assessment of the Portland show in our very own Portland Mercury, with enthusiasm that I share and with adjectives of tragic, intense, sincere, and slick, that I find overall fitting. Everyone agrees: the work is perceptive, incisive, historically relevant and innovative. What can one possibly add?

I have written about the general identity and politics focus in contemporary art by non-White artists for OregonArtsWatch when describing the Whitney Biennial (as it turns out, Rujeko Hockley who, together with Jane Panetta, curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial, is married to Willis Thomas.) So today I want to describe something different that struck me at the core of his work: the way he invites, if not forces, the viewer to interact with the art in ways that deepen an understanding of the issues at stake, or teach something about perspective, or lend a sense of agency that can be both, empowering and shaming. But first a (partial) outline of what is displayed.

There are some 90 pieces of his art on view at PAM. When you enter the sculpture hall at entrance level you are facing a circular arrangement of 16 28-foot -long ceiling-to-floor banners with appliquéd stars. Titled 14,719 and resembling the American flag (minus the stripes) each of these stars represents someone killed by gun violence. In 2018, mind you, a single year. You wouldn’t know that, of course, save for reading some statement in small print, or having gathered info about the exhibit beforehand. I assure you, most visitors don’t.

And yet, there is something so imposing, almost majestic about these banners that few people enter into the chapel-like interior. I waited patiently upstairs to get a shot, and finally asked painter Henk Pander who was my companion during this visit, to go downstairs and go inside after long minutes of observation with no one entering. Reverence is elicited even without knowledge of honoring the dead – is it reverence, then, for our national symbol?

Here is Thomas talking about his intentions: (the work was previously exhibited at FRIEZE 2018.)

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On the second floor, there are displays of photographs of African Americans that originated in professional advertisement; the images are cleaned of any text revealing what was up for sale, and the titles are changed in ways that use irony to direct the viewer to question what the true intentions and manipulations could have possibly been in that glitzy stock collection serving up cigarettes or the like. The series of digital prints elicits both a sense of familiarity (Oh, I remember those Virginia Slim ads!) and a double take when the new title opens a different perspective. The series called Unbranded: Reflections in Black of Corporate America 1968-2008)

A similar series, Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915 – 2015 this time tackling the role of white women in advertisement, had less of a impact on me. Same set-up, original photos appropriated, text removed, titles invented. Perhaps it moved me less because there was a huge emphasis on preoccupation with beauty, which made these women seem equally victim to their own vanity as well as society’s sexist or misogynistic norms. Images that stressed white supremacy also assigned these women both victim and perpetrator status, when you were still reeling with what you had seen in terms of racist stereotyping and clear power differential in the first section. Here is the artist talking about his approach of reframing the images.

And yet, here I was thinking about branding for women, when I later encountered the gold-framed Feminist tote bag (for over $30 no less…) in the gift shop.

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Indeed much of what is on display seems at first glance reminiscent of commercial work to those of us exposed to ubiquitous advertisement throughout our life times. Branded, as the series is called, draws us into something utterly familiar and then upends the notions we carry into viewing the work. For example, there are numerous resin-enclosed credit cards – only closer inspection reveals them to be sarcastic riffs on the banking slogans, now switched to historic names, places and dates that link economic enrichment to exploitation of slaves and peoples of origin. In the artist’s own words:

“Increasingly in our society you need a credit card even if you don’t use it, and you get billed for it, so I started thinking about credit as a form of indentured servitude, because of the way we’re conditioned to buy into this and to carry around all this debt. And so one of my friends, Ryan Alexiev, who is a graphic designer, and I started thinking about credit cards, and we made the Afro-American Express thinking it would be an interesting way to speak about this form of indentured servitude, using imagery from the abolition movement.”

Further in, huge photographic boards at first glance seem to depict the type of black athlete who many of us root for. On closer inspection there are multiple manipulations linking these images to symbols of slavery – branding into the skin, demands for physical capabilities to the point of exhaustion and injury, ownership of your talents, and the preempting of (other)potential with the false promise of a professional sports career (which is achieved only by a minuscule number of athletes.)

The most jarring image is one of a basketball player hanging from his hand with a noose above, titled Strange Fruit, in reference to Abel Meeropol’s poem about lynching. The invisible link between black bodies from the past and present ones, both under threat to their existence in literal or figurative ways is powerfully suggested.

Sports as a war-like activity was also captured in a quilt loosely designed after Picasso’s Guernica, made out of sports jerseys from different professional teams.

The use of advertisement-like enactments was most shocking in a piece that was prohibited to be photographed. Thomas photographed his relatives at the funeral of his cousin, 2 decades ago, who had been murdered as a bystander in a robbery over a $400 gold chain. The funeral image was overlaid with the typical structure of a MasterCard ad. Socks: x$$, new shoes y$$, and eventual: selecting a casket for your son: priceless! When this image was projected on the exterior walls of the museum in Birmingham, who had acquired the work, it led to huge controversy. People mistook it for the real thing and thought it was insanely disparaging of African Americans.

Something similar happened when the artist put up political billboards across the nation in 2016, part of the For Freedom initiative that he founded together with other artists. “Make America Great Again!” superimposed on an image from Bloody Sunday’s civil rights march in Selma was a huge billboard erected in Mississippi. It was enough to have both the political right and left go ballistic.

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Which brings me back to the point of interaction with the viewer. His works are not introducing something radically new or ephemeral enough that you need an art history background to decipher it, instead his projections capitalize on our familiarity with a medium which is then reframed in ways that hit us over the head. Clearly this artist is not shy to elicit confusion, to involve us almost as confederates – I know, a dangerous term in this context – in our familiarity with cultural archetypes that are then promptly stood on their heads. He goes beyond where it really starts to hurt in revealing the manipulation we subject ourselves to, by those who want to sell us something and by him, who wants us to wake up.

He is able to drive home the point that our perspective is malleable – nowhere better than in some of his lenticular pieces that reveal different vistas depending on where you stand, physically, and your point of view when you take action to activate some of the display. (The link describes the process of how this is technically accomplished.) One minute you see a portrait that is crystal clear, yet as you move around it, the image becomes increasingly blurred, what’s black or white ends up as: gray.

The Portland Art Museum is sensitive to this point of desired dialogue: many of the written comments next to each art work are from a diverse set of viewers, young audience members included, and not the typical curatorial didactics.

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Willis Thomas is committed to exchange: here is a short clip of another project recently enacted in Brooklyn that actively invites dialogue. And today he will introduce new work at the Gordon Parks Foundation, Exoduster, about the framing of historic events and the power of story telling, in this case the story of escaped slaves and those trying to help them to freedom captured in Park’s seminal film The Learning Tree. It is a dialogue of a different kind, a response to a revered artist of whom but his work lives on.

Thomas’ twitter handle says: Artist at Large. Man on the street. Strikes me as half coy, half extraordinarily true: he is interested in walking among us, forcing reaction. In that, he succeeded.

https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/hank-willis-thomas-the-truth-is-i-see-you/