NEW LONDON, CONN.- Lyman Allyn Art Museum announced the display and promised gift of Blue Study No. 10, 2024, a work of art by the prominent contemporary artist Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976). The retroreflective work has been installed in the Museum’s American Perspectives permanent collection gallery in celebration of Black History Month, where it will remain on view.
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A conceptual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, Hank Willis Thomas explores themes of perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture in his art. Over the last ten years, he has explored the retroreflective medium, creating mixed media works that reveal two distinct scenes when viewed with ambient and flash lighting. Seen from one perspective, these artworks present bold figurations, abstractions, and landscapes in saturated colors; seen from another, fragmented archival scraps from Thomas’s other projects over the last decade are revealed. As these elements converge and transform, they shed light on new layers of images, ideas, and meanings that are hidden in plain sight. The central figure in this composition (most visible with flash) is taken from a portrait by Seydou Keïta (Bamako, Mali, 1921–2001), the celebrated African photographer and portraitist.
Hank Willis Thomas’s wide-ranging art practice includes large-scale public sculpture, notably The Embrace, a 20-foot-tall bronze sculpture in 2023, commissioned for Boston Common. That work depicts the arms of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King in a tender embrace after Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Another prominent large-scale commission is the 2019 bronze sculpture Unity, installed at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A. M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). Thomas’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and the Aperture West Book Prize (2008), among other awards.
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