An interview with Hank Willis Thomas
As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present this interview with Hank Willis Thomas, conducted by Katerina Cizek
Thomas is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist whose work addresses identity, bias commodification, and popular culture. His projects combine participatory and interactive elements with photography, video, sculpture, installations, and more.
He is the co-founder of For Freedoms, a national platform for creative civic engagement which uses “art as a vehicle to for participation to deepen public discussions on civic issues and core values.” The comprehensive exhibit of his work, Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal… ,will open in the fall of 2019 at the Portland Art Museum.
I’m curious to know your thoughts on co-creation. You had started talking about the need for a canon.
There hasn’t really been a canon for co-creation. Within the film world, we have collaboration, but everyone has very specific titles and roles that imply a certain kind of seniority, which can be very helpful, but, at the same time, a new form of collaboration has allowed for a different approach when it comes to making decisions. They say you can’t make art by committee, but I think there’s a lot to learn by doing things that way, because different people have different perspectives on what is valuable, what is true, and what is problematic.
How do you move from making art by committee to a real collective where the results somehow become greater than the sum of its parts?
I’d like it if there were a way for best practices to be explored at the beginnings of projects like this. At Tribeca Film Institute, they’ve talked about an exit strategy as being a real important thing to consider. Everyone’s not going to want to carry the ball the whole way. What does success look like? People have kids, people get married, people move. Does the project end or is there a way for it to continue and to have new stewardship? These are some of the questions I think about when I think about some of our projects: “Is it really complete, or did we just dissipate?”
If you’re making a documentary, presumably, it’s to go to film festivals and it has a certain run time. We used to put it on DVD, but, whatever, now it’s on Netflix. I almost think it would be more beneficial thinking about films the way that start-ups plan website development. There’s the pre-alpha, the alpha, the beta version, there’s the alpha version, then there’s the launch and updates. You’re expecting it to grow, and the strategy about making the work is really built into this idea of it evolving and building an audience.
Can you speak to your current project and describe how that’s at play?
Question Bridge and the Truth Booth,two of my previous projects, are non-traditional documentary and not fiction. Both of those projects are not really over. For Freedoms, which is even more open, started off as a super PAC, but it really is a platform for audience engagement. We want civic leaders to see themselves as creative people designing society and laws.
For Freedoms is trying to create a platform for that while acknowledging that a lot of the work that happens in spaces like art museums and festivals and universities is also civic work. We are trying to make that space through doing exhibitions, town halls, billboards in collaboration with artists across the country.
Why do you think co-creation methods are so important for our times?
I think it’s always important. I think this idea of the brand narrative is often a really problematic approach to looking at the value of creative pursuits. It presumes that one has to be exceptional to be able to contribute something important. I believe, more often than not, everyone has something valuable to contribute.
If it is a collaborative project or process it requires as much listening as it does speaking. Everyone’s ego has to take a little bit of a side step for the greater good. We all have the chance to be quiet and listen and benefit from what other people have to contribute.
What are the risks of using the term “co-creation,” or even the methods themselves?
There aren’t established best processes and practices. I’m sure you’ve applied for many grants and fellowships. It’s all about, “Tell us about you.” What if the “you” is five people? I think it often winds up falling into a Rolling Stones or the Beatles scenario, where one or two people get all the credit, and the others wind up in the background. Maybe they’re not as charismatic, or maybe they don’t have the star power. I think egos can be harmed, which can hurt the overall headspace of a project.
There’s never going to be a project where everyone invests the same amount of time and energy consistently, all the time. I think that is okay. Just because I work 80 hours and someone else is working 20 hours doesn’t necessarily mean that my 80 hours is more valuable than that person’s 20 hours. I think starting with a big-picture view is important.
Capitalism leads us to think about efficiency and transactions when it comes to assessing a project. If you’re not contributing at a particular moment, you’re no longer necessary. With co-creative projects, it’s not easy to quantify contributions. There need to be ways for people to come and go without being discouraged or disrespected.
What I’ve found to be the most dangerous thing in any co-collaborative project is mistrust. If two people get along and one person doesn’t, it creates these wedges. People in the middle either feel like they have to solve a problem or stop caring at all. I think, in reality, that tension of people disagreeing and passionately needing to go in different ways is critical to the growth of a project. Sometimes, only one person recognizes a great idea and four people have to come around to that. It’s not going to always be easy for those four people to be like, “We started this, now you’re saying we’ve got to change directions?”
In order to do that, you have to have a real sense of trust from the beginning. If someone is putting their foot down, they may be wrong, they may be right, but they are worth hearing and being respected without others jumping to conclusions.
Co-creation is not necessarily majority rule or consensus. That’s what can be confusing sometimes.
I was thinking about when we were building our website. We wanted to talk about identity and show that there’s as much diversity within any demographic as there is outside of it. We were going to promote this thing called the “fingerprint profile,” where people would check off up to 100 ways that they might identify themselves. Kamal Sinclair got really pissed and threatened to quit the project, and we were like, “Why are you being so emotional, what’s going on?”
Little did we recognize but as the only woman and also the only multi-ethnic person at the table, she’s been asked to check boxes her entire life. As dark-skinned, African-American men, check boxes had never really bothered the three of us.
Through that long, complicated conversation, we realized, “You’re right. How can we ask people to imagine themselves openly if we’re already setting the parameters of how they should identify themselves?” If you say male, female, straight, gay, that already, in a way, predetermines the primacy of your own identity.
I don’t think anyone said it outright, but there was a feeling like, “You don’t have to be so emotional to make a point.” But, actually, if she hadn’t gotten so upset and frustrated, we probably would have been more likely to dismiss her argument.
From her side, it might have been like, “Why do I have to exert all this energy for you guys to come around? Maybe because I’m a woman.” But she was just ahead of us and we didn’t get it. This was a tough conversation. Sometimes people might have said things they didn’t really mean, but the process isn’t always pretty. Ultimately, we ended up on the same page. But, right as the website really started to catch on, we were exhausted. The audience engagement, the frequent modifications… We realized that to maintain that we’re going to have to write grants again for another $500,000 and who’s going to pay? These are the questions we haven’t figured out how to solve. The launch is just the beginning.
I think we have a lot to learn from musicians. Musicians use co-creation all the time. To make an album, you have a bunch of people in a room throwing around ideas. Through the miracle of birth, an album, especially if it’s an epic album, can be completed…. And sometimes, musicians switch bands, or start a new band, or revive an old band.
That’s a great analogy. Thank you!
This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.
Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and it receives funding from Just Films | Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. IFP is our fiscal sponsor. Learn more here. We are committed to exploring and showcasing media projects that push the boundaries of media and tackle issues of social justice — and rely on friends like you to sustain ourselves and grow. Join us by making a gift today.