Profiles In Courage

With his new show, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas asks a simple question: Would you stand up for what you believe in?

- Mary Kaye Schilling

HANK WILLIS THOMAS CAME across the photo in 2014. The artist, whose work deals with identity, history and popular culture, often employs vintage images in his art. This one, taken in 1936, is of a crowd of Germans in a Homberg shipyard. Adolf Hitler has arrived to christen a ship, and as thousands “Seig Heil” the Führer, one man stands, arms folded, a solitary figure of defiance in a sea of complicity.

Willis learned the man’s name, August Landmesser, and that he was married to a Jewish woman. Somehow, Landmesser survived the war, and his gesture, captured nearly 80 years ago, was a spark for “What We Ask Is Simple,” Thomas’s latest show. “What I think about when I look at the photo is that if I had been standing in that place, would I have that courage?” the artist says. “When everyone around me is doing the same thing, would I stand up for what I believe in? That is what this whole body of work is about.”

The show, divided between Jack Shainman’s two Chelsea galleries in New York and running through May 12, features 15 works based on photographs of 20th century protest movements around the world. (“What We Ask Is Simple” is a phrase from an American Civil Rights protest sign.) Images include the 1913 funeral procession of militant suffragette Emily Davison; a black 15-year-old who carried the American flag 54 miles through Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery, in 1965; members of the American Indian