HANK WILLIS THOMAS: I AM MANY
Jack Shainman Gallery
46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY
September 5 – November 1, 2025
Opening at Jack Shainman Gallery’s new Tribeca flagship location, I AM MANY is a commanding showcase of Hank Willis Thomas’s ongoing exploration of history, memory, and collective identity. I AM MANY marks Thomas’s eighth exhibition with Jack Shainman Gallery and brings together large-scale sculptures, retroreflective and lenticular works, textiles, and mixed-media assemblages, offering a comprehensive view of the artist’s practice at a pivotal moment in his career. For more than two decades, Thomas has developed a conceptual language grounded in recontextualizing archival and popular imagery, using it to examine how the legacies of exploitation and oppression remain bound to contemporary life, while also affirming the enduring presence of solidarity and community.
The show takes its title from I AM MANY, a work rooted in the historic “I AM A MAN” placards carried by Black sanitation workers during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Thomas retains the bold typography of the original while altering the phrase, allowing the text to unfold into new meanings. Rendered in retroreflective vinyl, the piece conceals images of historic protests that emerge only when illuminated by direct light, encouraging viewers to actively participate in revealing the hidden histories embedded within. A similar method animates Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018), originally commissioned by the Delaware Art Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of the National Guard’s occupation of Wilmington after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By combining period photographs with survival instructions once distributed to African Americans, Thomas ensures that these urgent documents and images remain visible in both memory and public discourse.
Sculpture plays a central role in the exhibition. Community (2024) isolates the simple gesture of hands and arms linking together, forming a circle that radiates mutual support and connection. E Pluribus Unum (2020), an eight-foot stainless steel arm pointing toward the sky, invites viewers to see themselves reflected in its polished surface, physically implicating them in its symbolism of collective aspiration. The exhibition also features Love Over Rules, a phrase Thomas has used in public artworks—including a prominent neon installation in San Francisco—reimagined here as an intimate yet urgent call to prioritize compassion and human connection above all else.
Thomas’s work, regardless of medium, captures what Roland Barthes called the “punctum,” those striking details that pierce the viewer’s attention and remain etched in memory. His practice reframes history as a living archive, one that viewers must continually engage with to understand both the wounds of the past and the possibilities for the future. In I AM MANY, Thomas draws together decades of social struggle, personal narrative, and visual experimentation, making the past vibrantly present.
