Layers of meaning

Hank Willis Thomas’s solo exhibition, Forever Now, is his first in South Africa in more than a decade. 

It brings together text-based lenticular images, retroreflective archival work and sculptural forms that create a bridge between America and Africa, between the past and the present and between individual and collective memory.

“For me, the title of the show, Forever Now, is thinking about the ongoing struggle for humanity to reach its ultimate manifestation,” Thomas tells me. “The struggle for all of us to become the best of who we are. It’s an urgent one but it’s also a timeless one.” 

“I’m celebrating a moment, a timeless moment, a flash photograph of it, you see the faces and the people, kind of who made this, who witnessed this moment and made it really beautiful. The work is often kind of encouraging myself and viewers to reflect on moments that we don’t always appreciate.”

The exhibition is anchored by an idea Thomas has long articulated: love is not merely a sentiment but a verb, a “call to action”. The principle manifests most tangibly in Love Rules, a neon sign that cycles through shifting letters to form messages of love, including “love rules”. 

The work honours his cousin, Songha Willis, who was murdered in Philadelphia in 2000. “Love is a verb of action,” Thomas explains. 

“Its meaning goes beyond the romantic idea of it. Love is an invitation to people to stand up and be generous every day of their lives. It is not an action of receiving but rather an action of giving. My question is: What do you do to give love? How is love breaking the rules you have in your life?”

This interrogation of love is inseparable from Thomas’s broader inquiry into race, identity and historical memory. Across the gallery, lenticular and retroreflective pieces draw from South African archives and American visual culture alike, inviting viewers to peer beneath their surfaces. A series of images of rectangular lines in bright colours on top of white canvases is revealed to be something deeper once Thomas shines a light on them. 

Beneath the red, green and blue lines are portraits of South African icons Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and Nelson Mandela hidden within the abstraction. 

“Even when you look at this,” Thomas says, tracing the lines, “you see how his eyes are highlighted, his lips …I do my best to make work that can be beautiful and have a meaning on one level, just to the naked eye. But then I love the idea of putting something beneath it that makes you reimagine what you just thought you already knew.” 

In this layering, Thomas reminds us that perception is never neutral; understanding requires effort, reflection and imagination.

The philosophy extends to his sculptural work as well. The Embrace, inspired by Thomas’s permanent memorial to Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King in Boston Common, isolates intimacy as a form of collective action. 

“Sometimes we get caught up in hero worship of the figure,” he notes, “but the spirit is what we really should be remembering and celebrating. The weight of his body on her shoulders, her support, their shared strength, that is what I wanted to highlight.” 

Similarly, a sculpture of interlaced black and white hands pays homage to the Lovings, a mixed-race couple separated by the US government under miscegenation laws. “We just wanted to come home,” Mrs Loving said after their legal victory. Thomas’s piece channels that yearning, the fundamental human striving toward connection.

In Silver Lining (2025), Thomas adapts a work originally honoring the “Greatest Generation” in the US, replacing imagery of Dr King’s audience with an archival photograph of South Africans listening to Nelson Mandela after his release from prison. “I think of success as a result of the struggle,” he says, “a moment when Nelson Mandela was released so you see the faces, and the people, kind of who made this real, beautiful.” 

The work captures the duality of historical memory: for some, a symbol of hard-won possibility; for others, particularly younger generations facing persistent inequality, a reminder of promises unfulfilled. Across both contexts, Thomas reflects on how communities endure division, fear and profound political shifts and how collective presence continues to shape the world we inherit.

“When I first came to South Africa,” he tells me, “I had some revelations about the world, about politics, about humanity that I couldn’t really see as clearly in the United States … It’s only in South Africa that I found out that race was fake, that it wasn’t something that’s real. Because what it means to be black here is different from what it means to be black in the United States. We talk about blackness in this generic way but there are so many hues just within blackness itself. That was a real revelation for me.”

He traces this understanding through the history of art and activism, noting the interconnections between African-American and South African struggles, “really integral in the success” of both.

The insights are mirrored in pieces that highlight protest and collective action. Some images in the exhibition feature protest moments from the US, Congo, England and South Africa, layered within lenticular works. 

“My work is really often trying to encourage viewers to look beneath the surface, to appreciate things, to acknowledge the surface reading but also to look deeper,” Thomas explains. The portraits and protest imagery he uses are not passive documentation; they demand engagement, reflection and recognition. In layering abstraction with history, Thomas exposes the simultaneity of beauty, struggle and hope, inviting viewers to inhabit both temporal and emotional complexity.

Love, in Thomas’s work, becomes a way of threading the themes together. Sculptures such as Love Rules or the gold-and-black interlaced hands do more than memorialise: they act as instruments of reflection, insistently asking what it means to act with generosity, courage and empathy. 

“Love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” Nelson Mandela once wrote, and Thomas’s work embodies the philosophy. Love becomes both historical and present, personal and communal, intimate and civic. It is, in his terms, an invitation to participate: to give, to connect and to act.

Forever Now also encourages contemplation of space and time. The lenticular works, constantly shifting, depending on the viewer’s position, make visible the tension between now and forever, between immediate perception and enduring meaning. 

“I want to celebrate moments that we don’t always appreciate,” Thomas says, “to meditate on the statement ‘I am’ … and what follows it.” In these works, perception, memory and identity are not fixed; they are iterative, mutable and collective.

“Exhibiting in South Africa, showing my work and discussing my ideas with South Africans really was a powerful reflection of who I could be at my best and wanted to be,” he says. There is a generative dialogue here: histories, struggles and aspirations from both sides of the Atlantic meet, mingle and resonate. 

South Africa, he suggests, functions as a mirror to the US, a site where enduring questions of race, identity and human potential become visible in new ways. “In a weird way,” he adds, “South Africa is the United States of America of the continent of Africa, the way in which we take up a lot of space on the continent.”

What emerges from Forever Now is an insistence on both reflection and action. Thomas’s works are seductive. They draw you in with colour, light and form but they are also rigorous and philosophical. They ask not only what we see but how we see it and what we do with that understanding. 

His art insists on generosity, on attention and on the recognition of the human interconnectedness that traverses continents and generations.

Thomas’s work is about presence, about engagement, about living fully within the tension of history and possibility. In his words, it is about what you do to give love, to participate, to stand up for the human capacity to endure, to connect, to dream. In Forever Now, the past is never merely past and the present is never merely present. Both converge, challenge and illuminate.

Hank Willis Thomas’s exhibition reminds us that art is never neutral. It is a vehicle for inquiry, a mirror to society, and above all, a call to consider how we participate in the shaping of the world. Across lenticular layers, reflective surfaces and sculptural forms, he asks us to confront history, to question our assumptions and to act in love. 

“My work,” he says, “is a call to action or call to love.” In this, Thomas offers a philosophy of life as much as an exhibition: that to see deeply is to feel and to feel deeply is to give.

Forever Now is on at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 7 March 2026.