Hank Willis Thomas and the Power of Language
By Alisa McCusker, senior curator at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is thrilled to welcome artist Hank Willis Thomas to for a free public talk on March 4, 2026. Through his wide-ranging conceptual practice and engagement with multiple media, Thomas explores intersections of past and present, revealing continuities in experiences and offering messages of love, connection, and hope.
The UMFA invited Thomas for this talk to coincide with the presentation of his neon work Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness of 2009 in the Museum’s lobby. This work is on loan from the Art Bridges Collection, which “represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices.” With Art Bridges’ commitment to getting art out of storage and sharing it with audiences around the country, the Foundation makes its remarkable collection, now numbering well over 200 American artworks, available for loan to museums free of cost. In addition, Art Bridges provides support to borrowing museums to develop educational programs around the artworks they borrow. This combination of lending art and funding innovative programming is essential to making opportunities for visitors to engage much more deeply and meaningfully with art and artists, such as this important event featuring Thomas at the UMFA. The UMFA’s loan of Thomas’ Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness fulfills strategic goals the Museum and Art Bridges share: showcasing significant works of American art representing a range of perspectives, interpreting art through creative and critical lenses, and encouraging visitors to experience art in new ways.
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976), Pitch Blackness/Off Whiteness, 2009, neon sign, 58 1/8 x 33 x 6 in. Art Bridges.
The UMFA’s decision to request Thomas’ work from Art Bridges Collection was made for two main reasons. First, the prominent placement of his work on the Highlights Wall in the lobby—an overt signal of the artwork’s significance—allows the Museum to feature this special loan that powerfully activates its mission “to inspire critical dialogue and illuminate the role of art in our lives.” The fact that Thomas’ neon words literally illuminate the lobby is a wonderful play on ideas, which we curators suspect the artist would very much appreciate, considering the numerous instances of ‘loaded’ word play throughout his career. Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness is a compelling example of how his works challenge viewers to think critically about the power of language. Through his incisive selection of words, phrases, and idiomatic turns of phrase, Thomas asks us to consider the complicated and multivalent meanings of language we use often habitually and without thinking much about it. What ideas do “pitch black” and “off white” conjure up in your mind? What meanings could it imply that these familiar adjectives are transformed into unfamiliar nouns? How does this example reveal how words and phrases reduce complex experiences of life and society? What other examples of language constructions can you think of that both reflect and shape deep-seated thoughts and feelings we may rarely consider? Let your critical dialogues ensue.
A second important reason for the UMFA borrowing this thought-provoking work by Thomas is to acknowledge and reflect the rapidly diversifying populations of Salt Lake City, Salt Lake Valley, and Utah, which will continue to expand in coming years (learn more from demographics research of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business). Thomas is a Black American artist who has interpreted racial and ethnic relations and social justice in various ways throughout his decades-long career. While the UMFA has a work by Thomas in its collection, The Cotton Bowl, from the series Strange Fruit, 2011, and displayed it as recently as 2024 (listen to community perspectives about this work), this is a photograph—a light-sensitive work on paper whose time on exhibition must be limited for its ongoing preservation. The year-long exhibition of Pitch Blackness / Off Whiteness (note: not light-sensitive, but light itself) allows the UMFA to feature the work of one of the leading Black artists working today. For years now, multitudes of studies of feedback from museum audiences have made plain the deeply-felt significance for visitors to feel a sense of belonging by recognizing their own identities and experiences in the art and information that museums choose to present (learn more from the American Alliance of Museums, which accredits museums for high standards and practices and just reaccredited the UMFA, and the International Council of Museums). Cultivating a sense of welcoming and inclusion for all is essential for museums to reach more audiences and sustain community engagement and impact over time. Pursuant to the UMFA’s mission, core values, and strategic goals, the Museum exhibits and collects art that represents the remarkable breadth of humanity, including the arts of the Americas. Black American history is foundational, not ancillary or subsidiary, to American history. The perspectives of Africans and the descendants of Africans are essential to telling the manifold and profound stories of human existence and our shared humanity.
The very notion of humanity inspired Thomas’ body of work that muses on the phrase “I am a man” through such declarations as “I am many” and “I am. Amen.” These works, exhibited recently at a solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, compel us to ponder the seemingly simple declaration “I am a man,” which bears profound meaning when we understand its social justice context: the statement appeared on protest signs that 1,300 Black workers carried during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Those workers were demanding livable wages and safer job conditions, after two city workers had been crushed under a malfunctioning truck—what was the latest tragedy in a long series of systemic neglect and abuse. The existential tragedy is that Black men in 1968 needed to remind the world that they were humans whose rights were denied.
Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the striking workers of Memphis the night before his assassination on April 4, 1968, in what is known as his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Dr. King’s prophetic and poignant words reverberate today: “Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.” Thomas commemorated the enduring messages of advancement for all and hope for brighter futures of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King with his monumental sculpture The Embrace on Boston Common, America’s first public park, unveiled in 2023.
Like all great speeches and great art, Thomas’ works provoke contemplation, discussion, and diverse interpretations. His engagements with the power of words remind us that individuality exists within the fabric of unity and plurality strengthens our bonds of humanity—stirring messages we can all celebrate.