Spotlight: Hank Willis Thomas — Hank Willis Thomas

The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by commissioned pieces of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, peers, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features a new sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas and a text by Ashley James, Ph.D., Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

On Love Over Rules (column) 2025 By Ashley James, Ph.D.

Hank Willis Thomas wants to make things more difficult. For nearly three decades, Thomas’s artworks have shone light on the many embedded or underexamined meanings and implications around societal values through his interrogation of the images, symbols, and language that constitute our popular and private cultural spheres. His image and text-based conceptual works (photography, paintings, and sculpture) have long asked viewers to see that which lies latent beneath the surface of dominant narratives, often by way of a kind of strategic clarity. In his 2005-08 series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, for example, Thomas removed the text from commercial advertisements targeting the Black middle class, leaving just the images behind. By presenting these images starkly free of context, the artist highlighted the distinct, cynical caricature of Black culture that characterizes capitalist enterprise. On the occasion of The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight series, Thomas is presenting Love Over Rules (column), 2025, a large-scale totemic text-based sculpture which, in its near-illegibility, seems to depart from Thomas’s distinct mode of clarification. And what might we make of this shift toward the obscure?

The text at the heart of Love Over Rules (column) is decidedly not new, but one that the artist has deployed in his practice in various forms over the past two decades, with origins both personal and familial. The phrase is drawn from song lyrics his late cousin, Songha Thomas Willis, recorded shortly before his murder in 2000. They are words which resonated with Thomas because they came from a beloved family member, and because of its resonant meanings: “love over rules” or “love overrules” as a kind of aspirational code of conduct that transcends all other value systems. Thomas has carried this phrase across a series of works, one of which was a 2017 blinking neon staged in San Francisco through the Site Unseen program. At the Brooklyn Museum, the phrase lives as a nearly thirty feet wide neon which greets visitors in the lobby from a towering height. The text is bright and clear, with the phrase clipped for even greater punch: “Loverules.”

While Love Over Rules has existed as a neon in various forms, this is the artist’s first time bringing his sculptural practice to bear on the phrase, making it his first sculptural version of “love over rules,” but also his first text-based sculpture altogether. It is in this shift from neon to the three-dimensional—joined by choices around typeface and materials—that Thomas has endeavored upon a new way of engaging with his work, one that relies on the frustration of visual legibility.

Thomas’s complication of comprehension begins with his selection of typeface. Unlike the Brooklyn Museum’s Love Rules neon (2018), which features an arial text that maximizes clarity and readability, the text in Love Over Rules (column) is rendered in a serif font. First made by designer Albert Ignacio on the occasion of Thomas’s collaboration with Japanese apparel label Sacai, this font is curly, expressive, intricate, and stylized. In effect, these letters are less readable. They require some acclimation to fully decipher the words.

This illegibility is then compounded by the material in which the sculpture has been rendered. Because it is made entirely of stainless steel (polished to perfection), the sculpture is highly reflective, which means it mirrors all that exists around it, including the persons observing it as an artwork. It is by nature of this reflectivity that the sculpture becomes a necessarily complex and ever-changing visual plane.

What these layers of incomprehension amount to is a kind of frustration of pace. While the “love over rules” phrase always already required a process of reading and re-reading to explicate its many potential resonances, its reflective sculptural iteration draws out the process further, demanding a greater level of time and commitment on the part of the viewer, if they wish to achieve comprehension. What Thomas seems to suggest here, is that the meaning(s) of this work cannot be taken lightly, but should be integrated, sat with, ruminated over. Time must be spent on matters that mean greatly.

It is in thinking with this delayed recognition that one can perhaps see commonality with another recent sculpture of Thomas’s, his 2023 Boston Commons commission titled The Embrace. The work challenges hierarchies of cultural importance through a focus on an overlooked, more intimate moment in history—and it does so in part by way of confusion. Consisting of the larger-than-life conjoined limbs of Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr., the titular “embrace,” the form is at first difficult to understand as such. Through a process of engagement with the sculpture the hug is eventually perceived, as is its attendant meanings. Standing ten feet high, the curvy, refractive, totemic sculptural form of Love Over Rules (column) similarly demands a greater level of time-based engagement.

Because of its insistence on time and process (and in its use of the mirror idiom), Love Over Rules (column) can also be understood as existing within a lineage of postmodernist Minimalist sculpture and performance art, characterized by reflexivity and the staging of the body in space. Indeed, earlier works by Thomas have displayed similar inclinations, like his series of “retroreflectives” where viewers are required to act by literally shining light on history by way of the camera flash. Love Over Rules (column) finds Thomas exploring this performativity via text and sculpture, where the process of revelation is excitingly prolonged.

If there is work for which Thomas is asking more of your openness, your commitment, and your time, it perhaps makes sense that “Love over rules” would serve as its grounding text; it articulates a value system that crosses from the personal to the political and back again. As both a memento of a loved one and a motto for a kind of life, the phrase is replete with heart. And is that kind of sentiment not worth the wait.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. Thomas’s work has been exhibited globally, including The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR (2019), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2024), and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Thomas’s public art practice spans permanent artworks, including The Embrace (2023) in Boston, MA; REACH, (2023) in collaboration with Coby Kennedy, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL; and Duality (2023) at The Underline in Miami, FL. Select collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males and For Freedoms. Thomas was the 2022 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts honoree from the Office of Art in Embassies, Washington, D.C. Thomas holds a BFA from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an MA/MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received an honorary doctorate from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, in 2024, as well as honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME, in 2017. Ashley James, Ph.D. is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. James’s work merges curatorial practice with an academic background rooted in African American studies, English literature, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Prior to joining the Guggenheim, James served as assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, NY, where she was the lead curator for the museum’s presentation of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018–19); organized Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019); and co-curated John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance (2020–21). James also served as a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Drawing and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, where her work focused on the groundbreaking retrospectives of Adrian Piper (2018) and Charles White (2018–19), and has held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, and at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, where she co-organized the exhibition Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection (2015). She has contributed essays and research for books, magazines, and catalogues, including publications on Charles White, Palmer Hayden, and Howardena Pindell. James holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in English literature and African American studies.