On this episode of cultureXchanges, Meridian’s CEO Ambassador Stuart Holliday speaks with artist Hank Willis Thomas on how growing up in Washington, DC shaped his artistic vision, the theme of universality in his work, and what politicians could learn from the world of art criticism. Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, New York as a conceptual artist working on themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and the Rubell Museum here in Washington, DC. His collaborative projects include In Search of the Truth, The Writing on the Wall, and the For Freedoms Collective. He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.
Episode Transcription
Host
Hello and welcome to culture exchanges, a podcast at the intersection of the Humanities and cultural diplomacy. I’m your host, Terry Harvey, Vice president of the Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy. This podcast series explores the impact of the arts and culture on diplomatic relations across the world through discussions with cultural diplomacy experts. Today on culture Exchanges, Meridian CEO Ambassador Stuart Holiday speaks with artist Hank Willis Thomas on how growing up in Washington, DC shaped his artistic vision, the themes of his work, and what politicians can learn from the world of art criticism. Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, is a conceptual artist working on themes. Related to perspective, identity, commodity, media and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Hong Kong Art Center, and the Rebel Museum in Washington, DC. His collaborative projects include in search of the truth, the writing on the wall, and the Four Freedoms Collective is also a member of the Public Design Commission. The City of New York.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Well, Hank, thank you for joining us. As you know, at Meridian, we really appreciate your partnership on 4 freedoms and being able to shine a light on some of your important work in raising thoughtful questions through your amazing conceptual art and stimulating conversations. I wanted to start really I think I noticed that you graduated from or attended. Duke Ellington, is that right?
Hank Willis Thomas
Yes it did.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Tell me a little bit about what that was like and how that inspired you, cause that’s right down the street from Meridian. And it’s such a great institute.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah, well, I first came to DC going to go to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, VA, and that was a boarding school experience, which was all boys at the time. A lot of. Connections to senators and congressmen and their children, and sadly, we couldn’t afford. For me to. Stay there. Yeah. And I had an aunt who was on. The board of. Of Duke Ellington School yards and they had just launched a new program that nobody wanted to be in, called museum studies. And so I was part of the inaugural kind of experimentation. Guinea pig class of this new department, which was really about putting critical thinking into the minds of young people and and using artifacts as storytelling. And so while we were the laughing stock of the high school, in many ways I we were able to. Curate exhibitions at the Children’s Museum at American History Museum. I had worked at the. National Portrait Gallery. Internship at the American History Museum. It was really just like an amazing experience to get to see and touch artifacts and tell stories in spaces that are iconic.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
You know, that’s a lot of artists try as hard as they can to stay away from Washington and and you’ve actually through your work. Have embraced the idea that it’s important to do things that connect people through culture, whether it’s within the United States. But you’ve also done a lot of work abroad, and I was struck by something that I heard you say. Once you were working on a project. In South Africa and then your sort of iconic photo of the Statue of Liberty and the the raised hand and. I was wondering if you could comment on the sort of universality of some of the themes, like oppression, like the struggle for civil rights, the things that are kind of unfortunately a product of societies and and legacies and histories everywhere and and, and how you see the connectedness of those things.
Hank Willis Thomas
Well, that’s a deep question for some reason. Took me into a place I’d never have been, which is to the opening scene of 2001 Space Odyssey.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah. Yes. The guys sitting around the circle and then the giant slab emerges from somewhere.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah. And they throw the bone. I think the struggle for human beings to the evolution is eternal, part of human life and human experience. And with evolution there is a greater awareness of of who we are, who is us and who we can become. And I feel like that happens in every human beings life, but it also happens in. The life of. Every country, every religion, there’s this awakening that happens. And I do believe that it all leads to notions of liberation. I think where we disagree is what does liberation look like? And how does your liberation impact mine and vice versa are the questions that I think we often wind up having conflict over. And so with my work, I’ve hoped to try to. Keep the theme on the universal every human being wants to be seen as worthy of existing, of being loved and. The more that we do to make more people feel worthy and feel loved, the better off we are and and feeling. That our ourselves.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, I think there’s a tendency over the last several centuries we’ve created, nations have been created, identities, borders, things that. Create the idea of the other, but when you look at at art and culture and. Things that are created that they remind us, you know how much we actually have in common and we’re in a very difficult period right now in the world where there’s mistrust, there’s sort of a great power competition at the same time as nations in the global S that are struggling just to. Meet the economic ends of their people. It it’s it’s a it’s a real inflection point. And how do you get heard? You know you you volunteered to participate in the art and embassies program and you’ve exhibited abroad. Why is it important to not sit still and to? Take the art and take yourself. To where people need healing, people want hope.
Hank Willis Thomas
It’s it’s scary sometimes to go out in the world as an artist, cause oftentimes you don’t feel as if people will take you seriously. There’s other times when people take you too seriously, right? Like, oh, I don’t. I don’t get it. So you know.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, there is a tendency, as you say that to I think the creative community, especially art critics, uses a certain vernacular. Sometimes that average bears can’t understand, you know, in terms. But getting back to that importance of traveling and being present elsewhere in the world.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah. Well, Charles Long, I noticed that the new said something that stuck with me, which is that. Artists live in society subconference and what happens in societies where the art is stifled? Is they become fascist? Yeah. And because if we haven’t weren’t as human beings, we weren’t designed to be like sitting at computers and having schedules and and watches to like, we are organic, nonsensical beings. And part of what an artist practices is to actually make space. For the kind of mucky kind of inexplicable things that as animals that we are also kind of drawn towards and what have what I feel like is important because nation states are are relatively new and they. Have they had do have these kind of confined borders? Is that when you much like, you know, you have people traveling, they bring their culture, they bring their art. But I also feel like those of us who are, I’ve always almost always lived in the United States. But I feel like it’s important for me to gain as much as I can from the rest of the world. So I can hopefully. Better understand my view on the world and also put it in a context that’s much larger and and so I get to share I there’s times where I think a culture would be totally different than me and then like ohh. Those are people.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah. Have you ever been inspired? Creatively inspired through your international experiences?
Hank Willis Thomas
All the time, and each place is so different. I just came back from Louisiana and. That’s in Slovenia, and as you know, there’s a history of the dictatorship of of Tito and the non alignment movement. But there’s also 8000 year old history from. Going back to early Christianity and caves that are like. Epic and I I’m like just looking at antiquity. I’m looking at nature. I’m looking at like lakes and rivers and, but also thinking a lot about how that state live is across the water. Like you can see Italy, Slovenia, which used to be Yugoslavia and. How people who have been kind of crossing these imaginary lines forever are now identified by like this arbitrary border and I’m I’m for me, I realized that. The border is. All always in my mind. And so as an artist. I feel it’s important for me to bridge binaries to trans to the degree I can like to to connect, to transform, I guess. My own and other people’s understanding of who we are and how we became through looking at historical images, historical archives and putting it in the contemporary context.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, you’re sort of the perfect artist for the moment, really, because 50 years ago or 100 years ago, it had been very hard to. Tackle some of the themes that you do and hopefully next generation. We’ll see these works and. Not only be inspired by them as. Beautiful works of art, but the story they tell about the struggle for justice.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yes, I agree. I hope so. I mean, one of the things that I also contend with is the lifespan of most works of art that I recognized is. Exists largely outside of the lifetime of the artist. Yeah. Meaning like. Latisse has been dead for 70 years. And he wasn’t alive.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, no, your work. It’s it’s it’s enduring, it’s enduring, particularly sculpture. When we were talking about travel, it reminded me of looking at some of David Hockney’s work when he.
Hank Willis Thomas
As an artist.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
You know, started off in California with painting like Splash, you know, which is to me like the most iconic California scene that you can imagine that something about the light, the subject matter. But then he moved back to England and started painting English countryside. Then he moved to Normandy in France. And in each place you could tell it’s his work, but he felt, you know, called to create. And and actually use these different environments. To reestablish new chapters and I guess artists do that. I think Picasso you know also moved around, changed his work. Do you see in your Hank Willis Thomas work sort of this? Is who I. Am this is the look this is you. You want people to say this is a Hank. Well, it’s Thomas. Or do you see phases of moving to sort of periods where you know some next thing that you want to? Try to achieve. Is always on the horizon.
Hank Willis Thomas
Well, I I would love to have as broad and as extensive a career as David. Hockey is now it’s doing iPad paintings right in the 90s for. Like that? Who? Has been so committed to the the practice that it doesn’t, that he’s willing to he remember the Polaroids like he would.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
It was prolific, completely prolific, yeah.
Hank Willis Thomas
You going to change? He is willing to change with the times and to be a lifelong learner and and A and A and a. And if you can follow that journey it it’s pretty amazing. I I would love to have that. Kind of legacy. I think I’ve been much more caught up, particularly because of my. Prescribed identity as a African American, which is a hyphenated. American I have always struggled with this idea of. Who? I know I am. And who society has told me I am and as an artist I’ve I’ve always. I’ve resisted the idea of being put into a box. I I studied photography, but I was always interested in what’s outside of the frame. And so that led me to go into print making and painting and sculpture and video and photography and. Right. Conceptual art and you know, and hopefully things that are relevant from a social practice and political perspective, because I I think about Walt Whitman and his song of myself poem where he says. That specific line, you know do I can take, do I contradict myself? Very well then I contain multitudes, I and.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yes, yes.
Hank Willis Thomas
I contain multitudes is what every person should be comfortable saying, and so I believe that my work and all of its diversity is expressing the diversity that’s within every human being and attempting to connect with the disparate elements of those who share parts of them. Parts of me with themselves.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Mm-hmm. Number of years ago, Meridian created an exhibition that traveled all around the world highlighting. The the state departments jazz ambassadors program. This is where, you know, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, and even a young Quincy Jones. Traveled around the world and did concerts for average people and connected them with them, and it was against the backdrop, a period in which segregation and Jim Crow laws were. Had only recently. Been been been dealt with, and of course we’re dealing with some of these issues. Now but I. Think these artists realized the contradiction of racial injustice at home and but still highlighting American culture? Of course, jazz is barred from lots of, you know, other cultures, but how do you when you, when you represent yourself, reconcile? The idea of representing the the American experiment at the same time that the experiment is unfinished.
Hank Willis Thomas
Then you just. Take me in another journey there. You know, as you took me through this story about kind of descendants of slaves, like recent descendants of slaves who use kind of classical. European instruments. To infiltrate. The psyche of and the government that was presenting to them, their with their music. They spoke to the heart. Yeah. And the speaking to the heart was so compelling as artists that it the government felt like we need this. Is the best of us. And there’s something that I believe that. When an artist is fully able to be tapped into their purpose is that there are no boundaries. There are no borders, there is only experience.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
So why do you think there are so many iconic, well known American African American? Musical artists known globally. And not as many visual. Or conceptual.
Hank Willis Thomas
That’s a good question. Well, I I believe the different industries.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, well, one is more commercial.
Hank Willis Thomas
Right. More organized, like more organized weird way with the art world. It’s it’s who you know. And you can you can be the most amazing, incredible artist, but if nobody knows you, yeah, it doesn’t matter. Whereas you can start with music. I feel like there is an industry that has a distribution channel. If you get the right people to know you, they can make sure a million people know you. There’s a reduction cause. How many people can know? That that many until but also. Yeah, that’s curious cause I think about when we think. About jazz. Music. I feel like the album covers were just as important. Yeah, as music, right? And and telling the story of who these people were, what they were.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
About it would be interesting to think about what jazz would look like as a sculpture.
Hank Willis Thomas
Yeah. Like which I think you know.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Because it’s it’s it’s very it’s very much improvised and has a certain built in chaos and.
Hank Willis Thomas
I feel like that’s what you know Picasso was listening to, and Matisse was listening to. And they was like, I’m so fascinated with, like, what was the soundtrack to the work that was being? In these places and then they’re artists like the African American artists like Aaron Douglas and Romero Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, who are also responding to European artists who responded to African American musicians. And this and all. As a result, frankly, of World War One, you know where. You had this. Confluence of people from all over the world who were converging for horrible reasons on Europe. Yep, but also kind of connecting in ways they never would otherwise.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Yeah, I think about that period and think about how popular Josephine Baker was in Paris. You know, she was the most popular entertainer in Paris. You know, the 20s and and in America.
Probably her music wouldn’t be distributed or sold to right wider audience. And and it’s it. It’s sort of a reminder of the fact that we highlight ourselves as the freest country in the world. But culturally, sometimes we limit things we fear, we limit things we don’t understand. It’s hard for us to separate, for example, Islamic art from what may be representative of of an ideology that we don’t quite get that we have. Umm. Fear of and in some cases, but I just wanted to maybe wrap with. A couple of questions about your process. So obviously you do a variety of different kinds of of media. But some of it. After you come up. With your thought. About what you want to do requires welding or developing pictures, or you know there’s a whole. There’s a whole process. How do you work or collaborate with your team to take your ideas from your head to actually? Putting them on a pedestal or putting them on a wall.
Hank Willis Thomas
Somewhere. Yeah, well, that’s a great question because. It it really? Varies. I believe that many of us artists who have been tapped to be many of us, I feel that many people who have chosen to become artists now. Would be at another time a psychic or a alchemist or a a the truth, a seer?
A shaman and part of what we. What I do is. Channel energy, you know to by pick up on I have a vision and then there’s certain things that I can do, but then I I might see someone else be like hey, there’s a talent that you have that you’re not using or there’s all this experience you have that could you could you cultivate it in this way and those people will likely say it. Well, I’ve never done it that way or that’s not how it’s supposed to be done. I’m like, yes, exactly. Let’s go that way. Yeah. And so it’s a combination of following my own heart and doing. Things myself, but also. Being open to the experience and the talent of other people to kind of. And my vision towards something else, which hopefully will benefit them in ways as they continue along and hopefully will benefit the the ultimate outcome of what the audience experiences. And it’s a, it’s a humbling process because sometimes oftentimes it’s not exactly what I want, but it also is more. Because of that.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
It’s interesting about art, so I’m a amateur hobbyist painter, and last weekend I was trying to paint a landscape. And I really didn’t like it, and so I just started. Sort of. Swiping the canvas with my paintbrush to almost like I was going to paint over it completely. And then something happened at the Strokes that were unintended. From the heart emotional expressions of something it turned into. A completely different and. Beautiful thing and it’s just interesting how I think it was Bob Ross that talked about happy little accidents, but it is kind of as an artist to think about what is a mistake. You know what, what is a mistake? I mean it’s it’s just part of the creative process really and it’s sort of liberating. To think about it that way.
Hank Willis Thomas
I do wonder. Though, and this is and you being in diplomacy, you can understand. I’m so great to know that you’re an artist. Because I always wonder what would happen if politicians saw themselves as artists. Yeah. And artists get better through critique and and sometimes there is the mistake. That is the actual lesson.
And rather than trying to explain the mistake where it’s just. Like oh, this is. Like we can kind of acknowledge that we don’t have it all together, that we’re in the process of growth and learning and we might have a picture that we’re trying to paint, but it may not be right then we.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
Have to work, work it again. I think one of the things that’s happened unfortunately in our society and it’s reflected in our politics is people are reluctant to admit mistakes. Because they they actually see it as conveying weakness when in fact it can convey. True strength and what what used to count as shame a shame barometer, you know well. You couldn’t say that possibly or couldn’t do that. That there’s been a lowering of the bar of. Of of what? That looks like, which has kind of unfortunately. Allowed political leaders to not have to go through that process of failure. They may be failing, but they’re not actually admitting failure. You know, right. And learning.
Hank Willis Thomas
Or not.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
And not learning. I did want to mention I’m I’m looking into this further, but on the subject of cultural diplomacy, the Dutch painter Rubens. I found out was also a diplomat and he negotiated treaties and I’m not sure if he was mainly an artist or mainly A diplomat. I think he’s mainly obviously an artist but the process of compromise and coming to a creative solution. Does require a little bit of of artistry because you have to come up with. If I tell you as a diplomat what I want, but I don’t have some shared aspiration that we both want. Right. What’s the incentive? There for you to to, to compromise. And so you know, Benjamin Franklin was certainly an interesting ambassador to France when right to France. And he became very popular because at that time philosophy was, you know, the sort of.
Hank Willis Thomas
Right, of course. The England or France?
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
The currency of the social elite and intellectual life of Paris and and he he didn’t sit in his embassy. You know, he went out and engaged with artists and scientists and philosophers and was able to gain leverage for getting France to help pay for and support. The revolution, not by being a politician, but by really connecting. With people and I, I hope more ambassadors and politicians come from the cultural community, think it would lead to a more humane and understanding world. And and Hank, I can’t thank you enough for your time. I enjoyed being with you in Portugal. Congratulations again on.
Hank Willis Thomas
Thank you.
Ambassador Stuart Holliday
All of your fantastic achievements, and don’t forget about us down here in DC.
Hank Willis Thomas
OK, can’t wait to be back. Thank you so much. Thank.
Host
Thank you for joining us today on culture exchanges, the podcast that examines the impact of cultural diplomacy in its many forms on global relations. We’d like to thank our guests on this episode for taking the time to share their expertise. Our podcast editor, Ed Bishop, and our listeners for taking the time to engage in the world of cultural diplomacy.
