HANK WILLIS THOMAS

As with his debut Johannesburg exhibition, History Doesn’t Laugh, Thomas approaches the South African context with deliberate care, setting the African-American experience in conversation with South Africa’s own histories of struggle, aspiration, and visual culture. Forever Now offers South African audiences a rare encounter with an artist who has become a defining figure in public art across America, while opening new points of connection across geographies and generations.

To convey this, a group of major works adapted from public installations in the United States anchor the presentation. Love Rules (Horizon Blue) – installed at the entrance of the Brooklyn Museum – advances the legacy of Thomas’s late cousin, Songha Thomas Willis, whose last words were “love over rules”. The illuminated text rhythmically shifts between LOVERULES, LOVERULES, LOVERULES, and LOVERULES, proposing love as a mutable force shaped by circumstance and collective will. The Embrace (2023) derives from Thomas’s permanent memorial to Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King on Boston Common. The monument foregrounds an intimate gesture rather than full figural representation. “When we recognise that all storytelling is an abstraction, all representation is an abstraction,” Thomas notes, “it allows us to be open to more dynamic and complex forms of representation.” In scaled form, this small version of The Embrace further universalises this idea, shifting the focus from hero worship to shared humanity and collective action.