EVERYDAY
PEOPLE
Works by Hank Willis Thomas and Liu Shiming
Curated by Emann Odufu
Time & Location
Liu Shiming Art Gallery. 15 E 40th St., 5th Floor
New York, NY 10016
May 27 – July 31, 2025. Open Monday–Saturday 11AM–5PM
Public Events
Opening Reception (May 27, 2025. 6 PM)
Join us for the opening reception of "People Everyday" on Tuesday, May 27 at 6 PM at the Liu Shiming Art Gallery.
Artist Talk (June 16, 2025, 6 PM)
This artist talk brings together conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas and exhibition curator Emann Odufu in conversation with journalist and Liu Shiming Art Foundation board member Andrew Serwer. Together, they will explore the themes of the current exhibition People Everyday, as well as the resonance between Liu’s artistic journey in 20th-century China and Thomas’s reflections on identity and history in a contemporary U.S. context.
Exhibition Overview
The Liu Shiming Art Foundation is pleased to present People Everyday, a cross-generational exhibition that brings together the work of Hank Willis Thomas and Liu Shiming. Featuring over 35 works, including sculpture and painting, the exhibition highlights both artists’ shared investment in the human form, caregiving, and community as sites of dignity, memory, and transformation.
Working across vastly different cultural and temporal contexts, Thomas and Liu each draw attention to “everyday people” as essential agents of social history. Liu’s deeply empathetic sculptures of farmers, mothers, and workers reflect his experience living among rural communities in mid-20th century China. Thomas, in turn, engages archival images and contemporary materials to examine Black identity, resistance, and care in the United States.
Exhibition Highlights
In Thomas’s Icarus in the Sunlight and Icarus in the Moonlight (2024), abstracted limbs gesture skyward in ambiguous states of motion—simultaneously reaching, falling, and striving. These poetic forms mirror Liu’s intimate sculptural studies of strength in motion, including his seminal Cutting Through Mountains to Bring in Water (1958), a heroic depiction of determination against physical and ideological barriers during China’s Great Leap Forward.
Both artists also emphasize gesture as a mode of connection. In Liu’s Fuse (big) (1992), the union of two bodies forms a singular, emotive structure. Similarly, Thomas’s The Embrace (2023) monumentalizes the entwined arms of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, offering a symbol of love and resistance through the body’s most human expressions.
“Whether sculpting rural mothers, boatmen, or intertwined hands, both Liu and Thomas reject the glorification of the powerful. Instead, they elevate those who carry, cradle, walk, and row—those whose quiet or bold gestures sustain the world.”
— Emann Odufu, Curator
About the Artists
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, NJ) is a conceptual artist whose work addresses identity, perspective, media, and the construction of collective memory. His practice spans photography, sculpture, installation, and public art, often incorporating archival imagery and retroreflective materials to activate audience participation. Thomas is the co-founder of For Freedoms, a national platform for civic engagement through art.
Liu Shiming (1926–2010) was a pioneering figure in Chinese sculpture. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Liu’s work blends traditional Chinese aesthetics with modernist influences. He is celebrated for his intimate portrayals of rural life and his distinctive "Chinese Method," which emphasizes narrative and cultural grounding. His works are housed in institutions across Asia, North America, and Europe. In 2018, the Liu Shiming Sculpture Museum was established at CAFA.