Date
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Time
6:30 pm
Event Details
We invite you to join the Des Moines Art Center in welcoming Artist Hank Willis Thomas as the featured speaker of our annual Fingerman Lecture. Hank Willis Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as 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, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.
Thomas’s public art practice includes the recently unveiled memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, “The Embrace” on Boston Common. “When we recognize that all storytelling is an abstraction, all representation is an abstraction, hopefully it allows us to be open to more dynamic and complex forms of representation that don’t stick us to narrative that oversimplifies a person or their legacy, and I think this work really tries to get to the heart of that.” – Hank Willis Thomas
Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017. Read the artist’s full bio HERE
This lecture is the 33rd in the series made possible through generous gifts by Louis and the late Dr. Lois Fingerman. Additional support provided by Krause Group.
This lecture is free to attend, and reservations are required.
Photo: Left – Hank Willis Thomas. Photo by Jai Lennard. Right – Hank Willis Thomas’s “The Embrace,” Permanent Monument on Boston Common. Image Credit: Mass Design Group.
