Hank Willis Thomas’s Forever Now, his first solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery in South Africa in over a decade, arrives in a moment of acute historical resonance. In 2026, fifty years have passed since the 1976 Youth Uprisings, memorialised in the iconic, grief-laden photograph of Hector Pieterson. The exhibition does not merely present a retrospective of Thomas’s conceptual practice; it situates his work in dialogue with South Africa’s histories of struggle, aspiration, and collective memory, drawing subtle but deliberate parallels between the African-American and South African experiences of resistance, hope, and loss. In Johannesburg, Forever Now becomes both a lens and a mirror: it invites audiences to interrogate how communities endure, remember, and act in the face of systemic inequities.
The exhibition brings together a range of media that speak to Thomas’s enduring concern with visibility, identity, and shared humanity. Lenticular and holographic works render time and perception materially, asking viewers to witness, pause, and consider their place within overlapping narratives of history and experience. Text-based pieces such as I am Human, Love, and Mind Your Heart operate simultaneously as visual and ethical signposts, foregrounding words as acts of recognition, challenge, and care. These works, by their very legibility and public presence, insist upon engagement: the viewer becomes a participant in Thomas’s call to action, or as he frames it, a call to love.
Community and relationality are made tangible in the exhibition’s collages and sculptures. Collages of crowds capture the paradox of collective presence and individual distinctiveness, reflecting how communities cohere even as they remain composed of autonomous beings. Bronze sculptures, carefully cast depictions of hand-holding, embracing, or fleeting gestures of connection, ground these gestures in permanence and material weight. Bronze, with its historical associations with commemoration, endurance, and monumentality, reinforces Thomas’s insistence on intimacy as a site of collective significance: relationships, care, and solidarity are not fleeting abstractions but enduring structures within society. Portraits of figures such as a young Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela similarly anchor the exhibition in historical and cultural memory, offering visual points of reflection that resonate across generational and geographic divides.
Love, as Thomas presents it, is both ethical and material. In a new iteration of his iconic work Love Rules, illuminated letters cycle through phrases including love over rules, echoing the final message of his cousin Songha Willis, murdered in 2000. Here, light, language, and form converge to render love as mutable, public, and demanding of participation. Works such as The Embrace and Reach extend this ethos, isolating gestures of intimacy to show how community, resilience, and identity are held and transmitted through the body. Holographic effects in other works further complicate this relationship between perception and presence, suggesting that memory, history, and care are at once visible and elusive, dependent upon the attentive engagement of the viewer.
Thomas’s engagement with collective memory is particularly poignant in Silver Lining (2025), where a crowd of South Africans gathered after Nelson Mandela’s release replaces the American audiences who witnessed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Viewed in the context of 1976, this work underscores the layered significance of public witnessing: for some, a marker of possibility achieved; for others, a reminder of promises still unfulfilled. Across both contexts, Thomas highlights the endurance of communities through political rupture and social upheaval, and the ethical responsibility borne by each individual within that collective presence.
In the exhibition’s title work, FOREVER layered over repeating NOW in lenticular form, time itself becomes both material and concept. Memory, history, and presence are enacted through the optical, the tactile, and the corporeal, demonstrating how conceptual art can embody as well as convey ethical imperatives. As Thomas observes, “Love is a verb of action… It is not an action of receiving, but rather an action of giving. My question is what you do to give love?” The exhibition renders this question materially, ethically, and poetically: in bronze, light, holographic layering, and crowds of faces, Thomas constructs a world in which connection, care, and reflection are inseparable from the act of witnessing and the making of memory.
In Johannesburg, fifty years after 1976, Forever Now resonates as both a deeply local and a profoundly global intervention. Thomas situates African-American histories alongside South Africa’s own struggles, offering works that are at once intimate and monumental, ephemeral and enduring. Through material, text, and image, the exhibition enacts the ethical, relational, and affective work of love, memory, and collective presence, reminding viewers that our attention, care, and engagement are the most powerful forms of continuity we possess.