To me, an artist is everyone who is alive and conscious of what they do.

Every moment we are creating, whether we're conscious of it or not.

So the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I walk, who I interact with, what I say, that's to me, just as much making art as it is when I put something up in a gallery or take a photograph.

♪♪♪ My name is Hank Willis Thomas, and this is how art changed me.

I would say that the first conscious, creative acts that I did were reorganizing photo albums when I was 5 or 6 years old, at my grandmother's house, where I was re-correlating photo albums based off of my kind of rubric about who was related to who and what happened when.

And so that was a form of curation and storytelling.

I've worked with photographs for as long as I can remember, and I've all my work is about framing and context and about how, um, whoever is -- created the frame is actually making the reality that we know.

That is something I learned through my mother's work as a photographer and a photo historian who looked at the legacy of black photographers, which was, um, a different framing than what mainstream photography told me about the world.

I use art as a tool to learn about myself, to process, um... and understand [Chuckles] who I am, how I came to be, where I'm going.

When I think about a specific work that changed me, they would be "Question Bridge: Black Males," which was a video-mediated mega log between African American men where we had a question-and-answer exchange.

The premise was that there's as much diversity within any demographic as there is outside of it.

And so what we would do is we'd go to self-identified black men and video record them asking questions of other self-identified black men.

We thought we would show one question to, you know, 5 or 10 black men and choose the best answer, but instead we got 5 or 10 different answers.

And each one had its own merit, it had its own value and was unique.

The same person could respond to a very different question in a way that might be contradictory or surprising.

And we realized through this process, almost five years of making, that it wasn't really about black men, it was about people.

What happens when people are put into groups, how they exist within the group, and also how they find agency outside of that, while maintaining their own identity.

In the process of making "Question Bridge," the surprise that I constantly had was like an awakening where I was challenged to reconsider who I am, what I know about the world, and how I navigate it.

And as a self-identified black man who does not believe in race, uh, in part because of that, you know, because I am my own person and that race is a -- is a framing and a construct that has nothing to do with my internal life.

It has everything to do with what I do with my external life.

But inside me, I'm an infinite, beautiful human being.

What I love about being an artist is that I feel like I'm -- I get to be a form of like a seer or a psychic, you know, where, like, I have something in my mind and I'm like, I'm going to use all of this alchemy to, like, bring something into being that, like, no one else can see happening.

And then it happens and then I'm like, "Hey!"

But then after it leaves my -- my realm, it's got its own life and I don't see that.

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