Hank Willis Thomas & Jesse Owens – Running into history

What do the Olympics mean to you? For conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, it boils down to a single athlete – Jesse Owens. 

As one of the most accomplished athletes of all time, Jesse Owens shifted the bounds of what was humanly possible. In 1935, he broke five world records in just 45 minutes at a collegiate athletic championship. The following year, the world watched in awe as he won the 100m in 10.3 seconds at the Olympics. But for Hank, “athletes are more than people who run fast, jump long ways, throw balls – they symbolise our greatest hopes and dreams.” 

The 1936 Summer Olympic Games were hosted in Berlin under the rule of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party. Only 49 nations competed, compared with 206 in 2024. The number would have been much lower, had the Nazis not bowed to international pressure to lift its ban on “non-Aryan” athletes in public sports. Jesse’s wins were not just personal victories but also a triumph over racist Nazi ideology – an ideology already so entrenched that Hitler reportedly refused to shake the hands of any of the gold medalists to avoid having to shake the hands of those he considered to be from ‘impure’ races. Jesse, like generations of Black people before and after him, excelled despite complete dehumanisation. 

Hank’s upcoming edition “salutes that most famous of his four wins at the 1936 Olympics” – the 100m dash. The work’s title, The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness, is a quote from Jesse himself. The statement is not only a condemnation of Naziism, but also of the United States. Seventy one years after the abolition of slavery, Black people were still treated as second-class citizens at best and subhuman at worst. Lynchings remained a regular occurrence and Jim Crow laws were still the order of the day. The very notion of African American identity seemed contradictory.

Jesse Owens was born in the deep south in Alabama in 1913, a child of sharecroppers and a grandchild of enslaved Africans. Yet, at 22 years old, he was bearing the flag of the United States of America and winning gold medals doing it. Jesse has become a mythic figure in the popular imagination and that is what fascinates Hank – “there's something really powerful to me about this paradox of the American hero who happens to be from those who are disregarded and disrespected.” How do you represent this paradox without flattening the reality of such a complex historical figure? 

Hank began with a black-and-white photograph. Jesse is captured at full speed, demonstrating “his prowess, his ability, his stature, his integrity and grace.” His body is cut out, tinted blue, and pasted into a new world. By pulling an image out of the archive, Hank questions how we remember the past, and how history can be changed to tell a different story. For Hank, Jesse Owens’s story, like all of ours, is inseparable from the contexts in which he lived. “However, the context that their story is told changes with the times. And so how we talk about Jesse Owens now, it's very different in the way that he would have been spoken about in 1936 and the way he would be spoken about in 2036.” 

The figure of Jesse is covered with a simplified, unbranded version of his college track uniform – a red vest paired with white shorts. The pattern on the shorts mimics the openwork textile of a lace doily. The latter is usually associated with domesticity, an idea that is not usually at the forefront of  sports or geopolitics. Its intentional out-of-placeness conjures ideas about belonging, and who is included or excluded – questions that Hank has already called deeply political. Exclusion was a familiar feeling for Jesse too, one month after the games he remarked “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.” Meanwhile, all white Olympians from the US team were invited to a reception at the White House. Four gold medals did not earn Jesse a seat at the table.

The backdrop of The only bond worth anything… is a patchwork of blue – making up the third and final colour of the American flag. Hank notes “they're also prominent in the British flag, the French flag, and several other flags across the world.” This is no small detail, especially when you consider, as Hank does, that “sports can be a metaphor for militarism.” For millennia, a flag was how you distinguished between allies and enemies on a battlefield. Three years after the Berlin Olympics, battle flags would once again be raised all over Europe in one of the deadliest wars humans have ever waged. But in 1936, the impulse for war was sublimated through games – which nation could run the fastest, jump the highest, throw the farthest.

If there was an individual winner, it would have been Jesse Owens. But he could also be seen as a political “ tool” in Hank’s words “to contrast another form of oppression that was taking hold in the Third Reich, in the name of liberty and justice for all that the United States was espousing.” These contrasting narratives about Jesse’s legacy form a collage, echoing Jesse Owens’ famous musing;

When we tell stories about the past, it is usually more convenient to view events in isolation – like a history-making ten second run. Hank resists this impulse and instead rummages through the laundry bag of history to assemble the bigger picture. When asked about this process in relation to The only bond worth anything… he responds “I feel like these pieces are collages within collages. They are tapestries of interlaced images that are connected through the space-time continuum. There is something unspeakable that I'm addressing, and frankly, I can only feel it. I can only feel the logic.”

Go Deeper

Hank recommends upcoming non-fiction book Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis as an insight into “how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.” 

The film Race (2016) recreates Jesse Owens’ journey to becoming one of the greatest athletes of all time. 

Learn more about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.