At ‘Rising Sun,’ a Philly-born mother and son meditate on the life and death of Black men

In 1900, almost a century after Benjamin Franklin voiced his relief that the sun was (symbolically) rising on the new democratic nation, NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson composed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. Widely considered the Black national anthem, this post-Civil War hymn goes, “Facing the rising sun of our new day begun. Let us march on till victory is won.”

Facing the Rising Sun is what Philadelphia-born artist, author, curator, professor, and mother Deborah Willis titled her multimedia installation on the third floor of the African American Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibit is a part of “Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America,” the joint-run exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the AAMP, involving two museums, two concepts of burgeoning democracy, and showcasing work by a score of artists — including two from the same family — a mother, Willis herself, and son, artist Hank Willis Thomas.

A graduate of Philadelphia College of Art (now known as the University of the Arts) and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, Willis’ recent works include a 2021 collaboration with local photographer Naomieh Jovin for a series of portraits of women entrepreneurs in North Philadelphia called Black Women and Work and a 2021 mural called Point of Triangulation: Intersection of Identity found on 21st Street and JFK Boulevard.

In Facing the Rising Sun, Willis, who is chair of Photography & Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, enacts a visual requiem for Black Union Army soldiers using photographs exhibited on paper, on fabric, and on dancers’ bodies. The installation features a “quilt” composed of archival carte de visites and studio portraits of soldiers and others, displayed in a pattern across two of the gallery’s walls.

Amid these reproductions, Willis has also included a hefty granite Civil War sculpture printed onto a delicate translucent fabric. The monument’s inscription reads: “All who have labored today in behalf of the Union have wrought for the best interests of the country and the world not only for the present but for all future ages…” Savvy Philadelphians may recognize this passage from Hermont Atkins MacNeil’s 1921 Civil War Sailors Memorial installed at 12th and Walnut Streets.

Speaking to The Inquirer, Willis pointed out that in addition to being a bastion of abolitionism, Philadelphia mustered 100,000 men, over three-quarters of its male population, to fight with the Union Army.

Willis, raised in North Philadelphia, the daughter of Thomas, a police officer and wallpaper installer who practiced photography; and Ruth, a beautician, wanted this work to denote the city’s “major role” in the Civil War.

She traces her interest in image making to being a 7-year-old girl in her mother’s beauty shop, discovering Jet magazine’s story on Emmett Till’s murder, with the picture of his mutilated body. Till’s mother’s decision to release the photo, Willis said, “helped ignite a revolution — the civil rights movement,” and convinced her of the medium’s potency.

If Willis’ third-floor realm begets a potent consideration, as she intends, of how images of soldiers in uniform formed Black male identity, Willis’ son furthers those ideas in related mixed mediums with two works on other museum floors.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist whose permanent works include Unity (2019) in Brooklyn, N.Y., and The Embrace (2023) on Boston Common. In 2017, his Afro-pick sculpture All Power to All People (2017) graced Philadelphia’s Thomas Paine Plaza.

Just one floor beneath his mother’s installation, Thomas’ subject matter for Heavy Packed with Gas Mask (Amérique) (2022) leaps ahead 50 years. He fabricates an upended backward American flag using the reflective material of municipal road signage in hues of U.S. Postal Service blue and stop sign red.

Visitors are encouraged to use flash photography or deploy their smartphone flashlight to make evident the image trapped within — an archival photo from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art of another freedom fighter — a Black World War I cavalry soldier, in Thomas’ words, “standing in front of a barn, wearing Sunday best, holding a gun.”

Despite never wanting to become an artist, photography became a medium for Thomas to process the traumatic aftermath of gun violence when his cousin and best friend, Songha Willis, was fatally shot outside a Philadelphia nightclub in 2000. Thomas’ subsequent works, Bearing Witness: Murder’s Wake (2000-2008) and stills from Winter in America (2005) (cocreated with Kambuji Olujimbi), are part of an intimate and public memorial.

His work has continued to creatively engage with this loss and simultaneously grapple with “the larger genocide of African American males.”

If Willis, who’s published more than 20 books on photography, has invented a venue to recognize and commemorate America’s first emancipated citizenry, her son’s work invites viewers to question what that freedom means.

In an alcove on AAMP’s first floor, Thomas’ Question Bridge — made in collaboration with artists Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair — comes to life across six separate screens. Blinking on at erratic intervals, the monitors deliver snippets of testimony from the 150 Black men interviewed. Their varied voices enact a conversation as each informally testifies on matters pertaining to being Black and being a man in America.

Driven by broad questions, such as: How do we reflect history? How do we ask difficult questions? How do we challenge? The work, according to the companion book, edited by Willis, seeks to remedy a society “starved of the tools required to truly see, acknowledge and relate to black humanity on its own terms.”

Through Thomas’ childhood, there were “photo books everywhere,” he was “going to exhibitions all the time.” He was raised in a house that was simultaneously a dark room, an archive, and a studio.

Last April, at a Schomburg Center celebration, Black Curators Matter, Willis recalled how when she was raising her son, he was “jump[-ing] up like a docent when people came to the house” and bringing his friends over and “touching” her things. Willis, one of the foremost authorities on Black American visual culture, strengthened the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center’s photographic archive of Black life.

“My mother’s work is so broad,” said Thomas, who was awarded the International Medal of Arts for promoting cultural diplomacy in September. “It’s unintentional, it’s almost impossible for me to create work that doesn’t lead back in some way.”

In the decades since, they’ve often worked together, including cocurating the 2006 exhibition “Engulfed By Katrina.” This past March, the duo was honored for their creative works’ “keen insight to national conversations around identity, media, civic engagement” by NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, as the first mother and son honorees.

Summarizing the mother and son’s shared practice, Willis told The Inquirer in a joint interview, “A photograph is a message to the future. But when it’s used by Hank — it’s a sign to guide you to history.”

Columbia professor and curator Kellie Jones, who has known the pair since the ‘80s, told The Inquirer, “They’re using an archive to show us the past to help us think about how we move forward into the future, and how we recognize where the country’s come from, and to move it forward.”

“Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America” is at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (118 N. Broad St.) and the African American Museum in Philadelphia (701 Arch St.) risingsunphilly.org.