Hank Willis Thomas in "Bodies of Knowledge" - Season 11 | Art21

-[Hank] This is nice.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

So are these negatives all
your grandfather's photographs?

-Yeah, and I haven't
seen them, actually.

It's kind of
awesome just to, like,

open up a box and...

find these things.

These...

This is one of the
first shoots I was ever on.

-[Rujeko] Oh, wow.

-[Hank] These are photographs
from my mom's archive.

This is a picture I've
used a lot in my work.

-[Rujeko]Mm-hm.

-[Hank] They're being
baptized in the pool.

-You see the horns here and...

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-[Hank] This woman here.

Look, this is so powerful.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-The two things that I remember
people saying to me as early as

three or four years old are
"You ask too many questions"

and "You're not supposed
to stare at people."

♪playful oscillating synths♪

[chuckling] Most of my work is
some combination of the two.

Photography was a
reason to stare.

All of my work is
about framing and context,

and about how, depending
on where you're standing,

it really shapes your
perspective of the truth,

of reality, and
what's important.

♪♪♪

Along with photography, I have
to work in different mediums.

♪♪♪

I have to try different ways to
look at something that we might

think that we've already
looked at a thousand times.

♪arpeggiated synth music♪

I was reading Roland
Barthes' book 'Camera Lucida,'

where he talks
about the punctum.

His perspective of the punctum
is the thing that pierces you,

the thing that sticks
with you in the photograph.

When I look at this photograph
of a Harlem Globetrotter

standing in front of
the Statue of Liberty,

the punctum for me was this arm.

♪♪♪

I like to balance the
spectacle element of sports

with the context of
history and politics.

During my research, I was
reading Ernest Cole's landmark book

'House of Bondage.'

He, as a black photographer,
traveled all over South Africa

documenting the
horrors of apartheid,

and then smuggled these
images out of the country.

♪♪♪

The specific image of a lineup
of nude miners with their arms

up being strip-searched
really struck me.

I had seen it many times
before, but I recognized,

with a critical eye, that I felt
often guilty looking at this

picture because I was
always gawking at their bodies.

My looking at it was
reinforcing the oppression.

♪♪♪

I wanted to remake that
image as a sculpture,

so I titled it Raise Up.

I want to give viewers a chance
to walk around and look up and

look over,

to just try to look at
these men with dignity.

♪♪♪

Just about six months
after I made that sculpture,

halfway across the world
in Ferguson, Missouri,

the phrase "Hands Up,
Don't Shoot" became popular

after the murder of Mike Brown.

-[crowd] [chanting]
Hands up, don't shoot!

-[Hank VO] When I finally
exhibited this work in the

United States,

people called it "the
Hands Up, Don't Shoot piece."

♪♪♪

I see everything as connected,
so if I'm making work about

coal miners or Ferguson

or basketball,

frankly, a lot of the bodies are
connected through this history

of oppression.

-[Hank] Zoom in, and then
you can just cycle through the

pages.

Mm-hm.

I'm so glad that we chose the
3D-scan real hands for this

instead of digitally-made hands.

-[Sam Giarratani] I wanna
show you the finger.

They take the 3D print, and
then they coat it with this wax,

so that it can
stick to the ceramic.

And that level of texture is
gonna come across in the bronze.

-[Rujeko] Yes, that is crazy.

-[Sam] Yeah.

-[Rujeko] They look good.

-And so, do you know
what that piece is?

-[Sam] No, this is
actually just a sample.

-[Rujeko] Sample
for, like, the patina?

-[Sam] Yeah.

-[Hank] This is so nuts
imagining how they broke the

sculpture into 650 pieces...

-[Sam] Mm-hm.

-[Will] Mm-hm.

-[Hank] And how many
people are working on this one.

-[Sam] Yeah, it's
all hands on deck.

-The whole foundry.

-[Rujeko] Great.

-Yeah, we break ground on
Coretta Scott King's birthday,

and then...

it debuts on MLK Day.

-[Rujeko] Mm-hm.

-And so the eight
months in between,

everything's gotta get done.

♪sparse ethereal music♪

-[Hank VO] A few years ago, I
was invited to submit a proposal

for the Boston Common –

an installation in memorial
to Coretta Scott King

and Martin Luther King.

I didn't really know at the time
that two of the most prominent

civil rights leaders from the
South actually met and fell in

love in Boston.

The fact that their love
would actually ripple out

in so many ways from that first
meeting was really profound

for me.

I wanted to make a sculpture
that was inspired by their

intimacy that's
larger than life.

I found a picture of
them at the award ceremony

for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The punctum of
the photograph --

the part that I was struck by --

was the way that their arms
were wrapped around each other.

His weight was resting on her.

The fact that we speak so much
about Martin Luther King without

acknowledging or celebrating
Coretta Scott King was something

that was important to me, as
well as everyone involved.

There was tension, you know,
in me and also my collaborators

about what does it mean to not
include their faces and other

body parts?

But really, when I think about
Martin Luther King and

Coretta Scott King, I have a feeling.

It's not the pictures I've
seen, it's a sense in my heart.

There is a poetry in these
interlocking arms and this

sculpture that people will go
inside of

and replicate that gesture.

We wanted the sculpture to
actually get to the heart of it.

-[Dr. Deborah Willis]:We always talk about
the hidden

archive of Black history that's

not hidden but it's there,
and it's really the...

the researcher who has
to reimagine the archive.

When I think about, you
know, Aunt Cora's quilts...

-[Hank] I wonder if that's part
of the inspiration for me --

just a lot of the work that
I do is always very much in

conversation subconsciously
with the work you're doing.

-[Deb VO] I'm Deb Willis.

I'm a photographer, a professor.

I teach at New York University
Tisch School of the Arts,

chair of the
photography program there.

♪ethereal synth music♪

I'm a writer about photography.

♪♪♪

As a child, Hank was
fascinated with photographs.

He would go into the
photographic album,

ask my mother, "Why is
this photograph in color?

And why is this in
black and white?"

And he would change the
pages to tell his own story.

At that time, I worked for the
Schomburg Center of Research in

Black Culture as a
photo specialist/archivist.

After school,

I would pick him
up during my break,

take him to work with me.

He always wanted to know,

"Why do you have photographs
of people we don't know...

[laughs] in our house?"

And I said, "Because we
need to know the stories

of the people in the image."

-[Hank VO] As a child,
with my mother's work,

I didn't really
understand what she was doing.

Now, I understand that her
work, along with many others',

was really critical in building
and expanding the field of

photography, and
especially Black photography.

Looking at the way that
Hank grew up in a professional

archive of a library but
also in the family archive

made him curious about how to
create a narrative about Black life.

♪erratic synth music♪

What I took from
photography was incredible

knowledge and experience of how
to look critically at the world,

at myself.

Because I've always been
reaching to the past and trying

to connect with it,

sometimes the closest
I could get to history

is the photographic document.

♪ethereal synth music♪

There's something really
just beautiful about actually

beginning to see the scale now
that there is over 500 pieces

welded together.

It's like, it's happening!

I would estimate that there
are at least a thousand people

who've had to work on it
in some way, shape, or form.

♪♪♪

Engineers, architects,
and the community boards...

and then getting it
shipped across the country.

♪sparse synth music♪

The sculpture is
about the Kings,

but it also is
really imbued with

the care, consideration,
passion, and talent of so many

other people.

-[Roberto Morales VO] We're working
on something historic.

Martin Luther King, he
talked for the people like me.

♪uplifting synth music♪

-[Sam] We wanted to make sure
that we were really thinking

about all different kinds
of people

coming into the sculpture.

We wanted to make sure
wheelchairs can go inside.

We want people to
come up and touch,

so the patina lends
itself to being touched.

-[Jonathan] The story of Martin and
Coretta was inspirational,

and also looking at the other 65
heroes of the local

Boston Civil Rights Movement,

honoring those
names in the plaza,

and pushing forward a new
narrative of what it means to be

in the city of Boston.

-[crowd] Ten,
nine, eight, seven,

six, five, four, three,

two, one!

[cheers and applause]

♪tender synth music♪

-[Hank VO] There are so many
monuments to heroes of war,

and there are not very many
to heroes of nonviolence.

I'd like to believe that this is
just the beginning of a new way

of thinking about how
public space can be viewed,

and how we reflect on the past
with care and concern for the future.

I want to make work that really
gives people a sense of pride

and connection, that's going to
mean something to people beyond

my circle, beyond my world,
and beyond this lifetime.

♪ ethereal ambient music ♪