Opening Reception

New York Live Arts is honored to welcome visionary Hank Willis Thomas back to the Ford Foundation Live Gallery!

Trained as a photographer, Hank Willis Thomas has long been fascinated with the framing and context of images. Across his practice, Thomas regularly appropriates archival images – reinterpreting or recontextualizing them using new or rarely used technical processes. Viewers are often prompted to shift their position or use a tool to experience the entirety of an artwork. For instance, in his retroreflective series, viewers activate them with a camera flash to reveal the latent image, thereby stepping into the role of image maker. In both form and content, this series reveals multiple ways to look at a given historical moment or subject. 

In the case of these three works, Thomas sourced archival photographs taken in the 1940s for the U.S. Office of War Information and the U.S. War Relocation Authority, depicting schoolchildren reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Many of the students featured appear to be of Japanese descent.

The title of each work, Ex parte, reference the supreme court decision of “Ex parte Mitsuye Endo” in which the Court unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain Japanese American citizens in internment camps who were considered “concededly loyal” to the United States. However, on the same day, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case it had not actually violated citizens’ rights when removing people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. These simultaneous yet conflicting rulings speak to the ongoing dialogue in Thomas’s work that examines what it means to be an American, and asks how we reconcile the complexities and contradictions of history and national identity, as reflected in these works.