Love Will Always Win

“We have no history studies of love,” Hank Willis Thomas asserts at the opening reception of “LOVERULES,” the New York-based artist’s mid-career retrospective at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.

‍

“We have whole academies and schools for war, but we have no idea how to actually learn and to teach love,” Thomas continues. “It's not surprising that we're acting out of our ignorance in the way that we treat one another, whether or not we they've harmed us or haven't harmed us, whether or not they're important to us or not important to us, we don't know how to love ourselves. So therefore, how can we actually share love with one another?”

The exhibition's title is a homophone realized out of tragedy. On February 2, 2000, Thomas’ cousin, friend, and roommate Songha Willis, was shot to death in Philadelphia, forever altering the artist’s life. Something in Thomas died, too: “A few weeks after we died, a friend of his, Omar Ramirez, gave me a CD of them messing around on a microphone,” the artist explains to the crowd. “Some might say singing. And one of the last things that he said on that CD was ‘love over rules.’ And I couldn't tell he was saying, ‘Love overrules’ or ‘love overrules.’ And either way I felt like it was a message for me.” 

‍

The phrase went on to be a trope within Thomas’ practice, evolving into blinking neon sculptures, and prints. The exhibition, which features works from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation. is particularly timely in the United States during a moment where the current presidential administration threatens D.E.I. initiatives, immigration, and women’s rights, among other issues. 

One work on view, 20,923 (2021), features a long navy flag Thomas created in 2022 embroidered with 20,923 white stars (the number of people who died of gun violence in 2021 according to the Gun Violence Archive). The tribute was inspired in part by Willis’ death. Thomas blames the lack of gun control restrictions in the United States on the weapon’s sacred place in American society, citing the Second Amendment granting the right to bear arms. “We're not comfortable having debates around things that have been deemed sacred, regardless of the consequences of not having that conversation,” says Thomas, who questions the role of guns in the country. “How are they serving society?”

‍

Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915 – 2015, looks at the ways in which white women are sexualized, marginalized, and dumbed down in advertisements in order to sell products by stripping any branding away from the original layout. His Truth Is Marching On, 2016, takes an image of a man with one leg taken by James “Spider” Martin aka Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama. The photograph marks the day 600 activists were met with violence from police and state troopers as they marched to fight for Black people’s right to vote. The protest led to president Lyndon B. Johnson’s The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally allowed Black citizens to register to vote. 

“I saw this man who had one leg, with crutches, marching 50 miles for the rights of his fellow citizens that he was presumably receiving, but recognizing that if his fellow citizens were not being given equal rights, his rights were also being impended upon,” says Thomas. “I hope that each of us gets an opportunity to use our witnessing, whether it be through the art we make, through stories we tell—not to demonize other people, but to encourage other people to step in and support the people who they don't necessarily know, understand, or can relate to, because we would want them to do that for us.”

‍

Meanwhile, An All Colored Cast, 2019, appears to be a color field abstract work, but when a light is flashed on it, portraits appear of actors like Harry Belafonte, Desi Arnez, and Anna May Wong who paved the way for people of color in Hollywood, giving them their long overdue homage. 

“LOVERULES” makes viewers think about power structures that occur within race, class, and gender and how to create change that leads to inclusivity and equality. “His is a voice that I think is critical in today's time: how we speak to each other, racial issues, gender issues, how one maintains one's sense of self when they are bombarded with messages all the time,” says Schnitzer. “He wraps it all up.”

‍

In a precarious period in American history, Thomas believes that artists have the power to strive for change. “If we are truly artists, I think our sole responsibility is to make work that we feel is significant and important beyond the moment, and that will have a lasting impact, that will hopefully carry the human spirit forward,” says Thomas.