Here’s a sweeping pronouncement: The most important show in the State of Maine at the moment, hands down, is “Looking for America” at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (through July 19). I promise I am not being hyperbolic. The exhibition presents the work of Hank Willis Thomas, a Black conceptual artist based in Brooklyn, as well as many artists with whom he has collaborated in his studio. In terms of art that speaks audaciously and clear-headedly about our moment in history, which this year coincides with the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, “Looking for America” has no peer.

At its core it is essentially a wholesale repudiation of the America the Trump Administration is trying to impose upon the nation’s citizenry. What is perhaps most surprising, however is that it somehow manages to skirt polemics. It speaks truth to power, yet does so in a calm, matter-of-fact way that is poignant and eloquent, as well as tremendously innovative. For the most part, Thomas and his fellow artists simply present us with unblemished facts and ask us to just deal with them. They do not bludgeon us with what is plainly obvious. They do not speechify or proselytize. They merely ask us to witness the art and the feelings it elicits in us. The stoic, quiet power of that turns out to be its own incinerating critique. 

In fact, we could understand Thomas’s studio itself as a metaphor for the real America that exists beyond Trump’s limited and exclusionary white Christian nationalist version. Those who have collaborated with the artist over the years hail from many races, genders, sexualities and cultural backgrounds. “America is an invitation to be part of something bigger than all of us,” Thomas told a packed audience at Ogunquit’s Leavitt Theatre at a talk before a reception at the museum some weeks ago. The divisiveness we’re experiencing now, he explained, shows “just how un-American we’ve become.”

Willis Thomas has a wide-thinking mind and an astonishing inventory of interesting ideas. Humbly, he admits to not always having the technical expertise to execute them. So, for many years he has worked with other artists to realize those ideas, acting not only as fellow artist and collaborator, but also as mentor, helping these artists develop their own work and careers, attending their openings and so on. The exhibition presents Thomas’s collaborations alongside personal works by many of those artists. 

One innovative approach Thomas had was to use UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. “Untitled (Acanthus)” of 2024 is one of several works that employ this material. As we approach the piece, we initially see what appears to be a framed rectangle of acanthus-patterned wallpaper that, the label tells us, Thomas spied at the National Gallery of Art. Though its origins were 18th-century, “a period often associated with cultural pride,” the label reads, the wallpaper was actually made in the 1960s. A camera icon on the wall texts of the UV-printed retroreflective vinyl works instructs us to snap a photo of the piece using our flash, an act verboten in most museums and, so, not something every visitor does. 

But I strongly encourage you to follow this admonition, because when you look at the resulting image of “Untitled (Acanthus)” on your phone, what you will discover is that Thomas has applied the pattern atop a photo of a civil rights demonstration held at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. We are compelled, suddenly, to look past initial impressions and more deeply into how “history is stylized, simplified, and obscured.” 

What’s more, I recall from childhood how this sort of wallpaper, often flocked and/or foiled, was an emblem of middle-class white aspiration. The acanthus wallpaper, we realize, is a decorative form of erasure. In Thomas’s hands, then, it becomes a visual representation of the current Administration’s many efforts — from redistricting to dismantling principles of the Voting Rights Act — to disenfranchise and silence Black and Brown voices. 

There are many such works in the show. “Integrating the Ocean (Blue Splash)” of 2018 reveals a St. Augustine, Florida “wade-in” of 1964, protests meant to claim public access to places of leisure (here, beaches) that was denied African Americans. In “Colonialism and Abstract Art” of 2019, a UV print on Belgian linen, we first see an American flag against a white background. But with the aid of our camera flash, we find it is the Pulitzer Prize-winning image by Stanley Forman, made for the Boston Herald American, of a white teenager attempting to spear a Black lawyer at a 1976 Boston desegregation busing demonstration with the point of a flagpole that holds the flag. 

Nearby is a 2021 piece called “15,433 (2019),” which is a blue flag over 37 feet long on which have been embroidered 15,433 white stars. Each star represents a life lost to gun violence in 2019. Closer to the curtain window overlooking Perkins Cove is a bronze sculpture of 13 Black men with upstretched arms. It was inspired by a photograph of 13 South African miners who were stripped naked and lined up for medical exams before entering the mines (one presumes diamond minds). Rather than represent, and thus repeat, this humiliation—Thomas zoned in on only their heads, raised hands and shoulders, and act that restores their dignity. For me, the fact that the men face eastward across the Atlantic toward Africa, their hands held aloft in a kind of praise gesture, also feels like an acknowledgement of their cultural roots and their psychic and emotional ties to their origins. 

There is quilting (“Two Dancers,” 2018, a piece that comments on modern art’s reliance upon, and appropriation of, African art, which it absorbed into the European canon). There are mirror works (“A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection),” 2020, which connects the North and Central American continents with Africa, rather than South America, forever linking African forced migration to the American slave trade, while also, through its reflective surface, implicating viewers in this historical exploitation). There is video (“Black Righteous Space” of 2012, which endlessly morphs the pattern of a Confederate flag rendered in Pan African colors through sound cues—primarily from Black entertainers, activists, orators, thinkers and politicians whose voices activate the video). And much more, of course.

Alongside these works are personal pieces by Thomas’s collaborators. Adam C. Easterling prints images of family members onto bubble wrap, evocatively presenting ideas of the fragility and protection of memory. Andina Marie Osorio—a queer Puerto Rican artist—prints archival family photos on newsprint, then places them in honeybee nests. The insects chew at the edges, creating what looks like a fragment of the original photo. Honey-producing bees, it turns out, are all female. Their “collaboration” with Osorio, then, turns into an homage to matriarchy.

Next to Thomas’s fictional mirror map is Hector René Membreño-Canales’s own “Mapa de Rutas Comerciales” of 2025. This map chronicles the trade routes of the United Fruit Company’s “Great White Fleet” throughout North and South America and the Caribbean. The fleet transported crops and goods from slave-worked plantations to the American luxury market. Superimposed on the map are carefully considered pictures: Carmen Miranda as a clichéd Hollywood caricature of Latin Americans, another of migrants detained in a cage from a 1954 deportation campaign called “Operation Wetback,” and still another of a crying two-year-old asylum seeker whose parent is being frisked by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Sound familiar? We wish we could say these events are behind us, but alas…

Time and again we are confronted with contemporary realities. Some, like mass deportations, are touted by our current government as necessary protection for Americans (by which is meant, of course, white Christian Americans). Others point to uncomfortable truths Trump and his faithful would rather avoid talking about, such as police brutality, gun violence, slavery…and so on. At the root of this propaganda and erasure, the show makes clear, is a thoroughly un-American spirit — one of exclusion, exploitation and inhumane treatment of our fellow beings.

The night of Thomas’s talk at the Leavitt Theatre in Ogunquit, I was struck by an observation made by Membreño-Canales that is as good a synopsis of this exhibition as anyone could utter. “Looking for America is looking for our community,” he said. “Community creates coalition, and coalition is how we’re going to get through this time.” Amen.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at [email protected]. This column is free to access through support by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

IF YOU GO

‘Looking for America,’ Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 543 Shore Rd., Ogunquit. Through July 19. Daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more, 207-646-4909 or ogunquitmuseum.org