Embracing ‘The Embrace’
“It’s important, definitely, to highlight, to acknowledge, that this piece is a call to action, or call to love.”
— Hank Willis Thomas, TIME, January 22, 2023
On Monday, January 16, 2023, Boston celebrated the first public monument erected in 60 years on the Boston Common, the nation’s oldest public park. The Embrace Memorial created by Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) in collaboration with MASS Design Group, honors the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who met in Boston in 1952. A boldly-abstracted gesture of love, Thomas’s monument — placed within Boston’s four-stories- wide 1965 Freedom Plaza — is a based on a photograph of the Kings embracing in 1964 after hearing that King won the Nobel Peace Prize. The monument has been in the making for over 20 years.
The Kings’ love story began in Boston, with a shared desire for music, knowledge, and social justice. Prior to The Embrace, the only monument to Dr. King in Boston was a small plaque on the side of a brownstone often obscured by brush. Today, Thomas’ sculpture is the largest monument to racial equity in the nation, and the largest bronze statue cast in the U.S., using eight of the dozen industrial 3D printers available in the U.S. to produce.
When I visited the work for the first time on Thursday, January 18th, approaching from Boylston on an unseasonably balmy day, Thomas’ monumental sculpture — over two stories tall and 20 feet wide — came into view. White highlights against a reddish, chocolate brown surface of bronze glinted in the sunlight. Two female forearms, bared aside from a pearl bracelet and wedding band, appeared, holding up a muscular, male shoulder and bicep. Behind them, two bare canopies of trees old enough to have witnessed decades of Boston’s racial strife, arched above the piece, as the golden dome of Bullfinch’s State House gleamed from nearby Beacon Hill.
Thomas’s abstraction of love inspired visitors to stand beneath the Kings’ enveloping hug, snaping selfies for Instagram posts as they, in turn, embraced one another. Thomas monument makes a bold case for the ability of art to transcend society’s ills for the greater good, if only we allow ourselves to embrace its power.
Imari Paris Jeffries, Executive Director of Embrace Boston, recently described the King Memorial. He observed that the bronze surface, appearing like flesh in the way that Thomas has finished the patina, was a fitting complement to Boston. The bronze is heavy yet understated and elegant, and, he noted, also responds to the nearby Augustus Saint Gaudens’ bronze memorial. Considered the greatest American sculpture of the 19thcentury, Saint Gaudens’ Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial honors Robert Gould Shaw and the members of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Civil War regiments of African Americans enlisted in the North, later popularized by the film Glory.
Thomas brings a multigenerational artistic perspective to his vision for honoring the Kings’ partnership. As the grandson of a photographer, and son of art historian and authority on African American photography, Deborah Willis, Thomas was fittingly inspired to create The Embrace from a photograph.
By focusing on the Kings’ embrace writ large, the artist leaves their expressions to our collective imaginations. As a result of their monumental physical presence, their love feels all the more vivid. As for all humans with feet of clay, the Kings’ marriage was complicated, despite the moment of sheer joy captured by Thomas. Over time, Jeffries hopes The Embrace will become Boston’s own Statue of Liberty and a popular Instagram setting for announcements of marriage proposals and weddings. Describing a hug as both a moment of “vulnerability and security,” Jeffries also highlights the importance of including Coretta Scott King, the bottom hugger, physically holding up her husband. He notes she is a symbol of the “power of black women, and of women in general, as keepers and anchors of movements in this country.”
Freedom Plaza surrounding The Embrace reinforces the power of love in an inscription above a curving bench inviting reflection and contemplation. The Kings’ love lives on in rays of hope represented many of the figures who marched with them, carrying forward their work into the Boston community, now reflected by rays of golden brass inlaid into the Plaza’s pavers surrounding The Embrace.
The Embrace has already attracted its share of controversy. Echoing sentiments tweeted out since the sculpture’s unveiling, a female bystander with whom I struck up a conversation during my visit, quietly guided me to the north view of the sculpture. She waited patiently until she was sure I grasped the different angles where she saw veined phalluses in the shapes of Thomas’s monumental interlocking forearms and elbows. Another visitor I spoke with about his first impressions of The Embrace lamented that the artist omitted the Kings’ heads.
Thomas stands near the top of a long line of distinguished sculptors for whom first encounters with their public monuments were considered entirely undignified. Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917), faced scathing critiques for anguished expressions on the faces of his Burgers of Calais, completed in 1889. The artist wanted contemporary townspeople to meet their historic counterparts willing to sacrifice their lives to end siege with England on equal footing, placing his monument at their same level on Calais’ city square. That is how the sculpture appears today in public collections like those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now in Calais. And yet, those who commissioned the monument insisted the Burghers appear elevated on a suitably heroic pedestal. Two years later, when Rodin unveiled his monument to French writer Honoré Balzac (1891), the cloaked figure was dismissed as an enormous phallus.
Now 40 years old, Maya Lin’s (American, b. 1959) Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, when first unveiled in Washington, D.C., was criticized for resembling a gash, and its black surface of smooth granite placed below ground for representing shame or sorrow. Today over five million people visit Lin’s powerful, minimalist monument, selected anonymously from over 1,400 submissions.
Thomas intended his monument to the Kings to invite others to make their own meaning. The artist emphasized that intent when he spoke to members of a Harvard seminar on Monuments co-taught by professors Sarah Lewis and Joseph Koerner in the Spring of 2022, which I was grateful to attend as an Advanced Leadership Initiative fellow. For me, Thomas’ Embrace eviscerated the memory of a photograph seared into my mind’s eye when I arrived in Boston as a teenage student: Stanley Forman’s The Soiling of Old Glory (1976). That image captured the brutality of Boston’s racial protests during the busing crisis. Using an American flag as his spear, a young white man rushes at a young black man, who deftly balances on one foot to avoid the attack, using his briefcase for ballast.
Twenty-five years later, when I returned to Boston as Chair of the Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was responsible for envisioning and opening a new wing representing a more inclusive and diverse paradigm for American art. The memory of Forman’s photograph haunted me, convincing me that our first priority was to build a world class collection of art by African Americans. Despite Boston’s history as a hotbed of abolitionists and liberal thinkers, Black and brown artists struggled to give voice to their aesthetic contributions, even within New England’s largest museum, where they were all but invisible.
As I initially walked around The Embrace, one of the first rays I saw was named for Edmund “Barry” Gaither, who marched with King. Gaither later became one of the greatest champions for supporting our expansion of representing art by African Americans at the MFA, Boston, work he began in earnest as an MFA curator during the 1970s. Another one of our greatest champions was Theodore “Ted” Landsmark, an MFA trustee who chaired the Visiting Committee when the Americas Wing opened in 2010. Only later in 2016, when NPR ran a story reflecting on the 40 year legacy of Forman’s photograph, did I learn that the young black man being attacked in The Soiling of Old Glory was Landsmark himself.
Thomas’ art inspired by art, welcomes a new era for the city and the nation. Created during the period of widespread racial protests following George Floyd’s murder and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Embrace moves us to action. Concluding his recent interview for TIME, Thomas called us to action, observing: “It’s important to highlight that the overwhelming majority of monuments not only in the park, but also in the world, are monuments to violence, or memorials for victims of violence. And something as radical as a monument to love in a society that celebrates hate is going to and must necessarily change the status quo.”
Art powered by love and art itself can triumph over hate only if we allow ourselves to embrace it. Go see The Embrace for yourself, and while you’re there, discover the power of love to embrace someone, someone who may not look like you.
About the Author:
Elliot Davis has spent her career as an art museum leader. Most recently she served as director and CEO of the Norton Museum of Art, based in West Palm Beach, Florida’s largest museum and the leading arts and culture museum in the southeast U.S. Previously, Elliot was the John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas department at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she lead the curatorial program for the Art of the Americas Wing opened in 2010, and a curator of drawing and prints and American paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. As an ALI 2022 Fellow, she has developed an Art Museum IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility) Tool Kit and the FEELS Art Prompts for using art as a resource for greater well-being and happiness.