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Artist Hank Willis Thomas spoke about how love guides his artwork at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics forum on Monday.
During the discussion — which was moderated by Harvard professor Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and co-hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project — Thomas discussed several of his major artistic works, including “The Embrace” and “Loverules.”
“The Embrace” is a “24-foot tall bronze sculpture of these four arms interlocking, in a way referencing the Celtic love knot, but is based on the photograph of Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King on the day he received the Nobel Prize,” according to Thomas.
To Thomas, the sculpture is an “ode to the beloved community that the Kings worked towards manifesting and are still in the process of building.”
During the event, Thomas also spoke extensively about his “Loverules” piece, read as “Love Overrules.” Thomas explained that the work’s title stems from a deeply personal source — after the death of his cousin, Songha Thomas Willis, Thomas “inherited a responsibility with his legacy.”
“There was a recording of him that a friend of his left us with after he was killed, and one of the last things he said on that recording was ‘love overrules,’” Thomas said. “It’s become my muse, and also mission statement.”
Thomas explained that the statement is connective, drawing from the idea of active love.
“You cannot love passively,” he said. “You can love inherently and implicitly, but you can’t actually love passively. It’s something we can only do when we’re awake.”
Thomas said this process of active love can be difficult for him, even as he lives by it. In particular, he pointed to his struggle with self-love.
“There are moments that the hardest person for me to love is myself,” he said. “The hardest person for me to show grace to is myself.”
Thomas said this personal struggle can become a bigger obstacle in his mission of connecting and sharing love with other people.
“If I’m not doing that every moment, how much can I actually offer another person, and especially another person who I see myself as different from?” he added.
Ultimately, Thomas said the philosophy of “love overrules” — which he tries to incorporate into his life and art — is actually a “practice of internal work.”
“The road to progress is always under construction,” he said. “I’m always reinventing opportunities to love myself.”
Thomas said he hopes that the general public will take away more than just ideas when viewing his artwork — that they will feel that same inspiring sense of grace, communal spirit, and shared love that fuels him.
“Ideas reside in the head, and I’m more interested in the heart, and so I hope that people will feel what I felt when I saw it,” he said. “I hope more than anything that this is cause for a ripple effect.”
