HANK WILLIS THOMAS
ALL POWER TO ALL PEOPLE

“Public monuments have a higher charge now. They can celebrate a specific individual, or a group of people, but they should also invite a broader conversation about how a memorial can connect to the rest of the world and represent its people.”
Hank Willis Thomas

All Power to All People is a monumental work by acclaimed artist Hank Willis Thomas. Thomas is a conceptual artist whose work addresses issues of identity, politics, popular culture, and mass media as they pertain to American race relations.

Standing 28 feet tall and weighing in at 7,000lbs, Hank Willis Thomas’ All Power to All People is a provocative artwork combining the Afro pick and the Black Power salute, both icons of Black identity and empowerment. When Thomas conceived of a monumental Afro pick with a raised fist, he wanted to make an object that spoke specifically to African Americans, illustrative of the artist's longstanding investigation into the role public art plays in shaping collective discourse and societal values

Around the 20th century, Afro combs started to take on a definite cultural and political meaning. The “black fist” was added to the bottom of many Afro combs and is a reference to the Black Power salute that was made popular during the 1960’s civil rights movement. In addition to using the pick as a styling tool, many Black men and women wore the picks in their Afros as a way to express their cultural pride. The Afro pick exists today as many things to different people: it is representative not only of an era, but a sound and a counter culture. It is a uniting motif, worn as adornment, a political emblem, and signature of collective identity.

We encourage you to interact with the piece, learn about its cultural significance and develop your own interpretations and ideas around it.

Presented by Kindred Arts, Monumental Tour is a touring exhibition empowering social change through the arts. As Kindred tours these monumental symbols of empowerment across America, we are inviting municipalities and gatekeepers of space to fundamentally rethink how we might program outdoor public spaces to reflect and honor a diversity of human identities and experiences.

There is room enough for all of our stories, & we hope that Monumental Tour exemplifies how American public art can memorialize, inspire and at the same time, foster equitable commemorative landscapes.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

HANK WILLIS THOMAS (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist working primarily with 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, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands.