Situated across from City Hall on Thomas Paine Plaza, Hank Willis Thomas’ All Power to All People is a public art intervention around identity and representation in Philadelphia. Thomas’ Afro pick sculpture stands at eight feet tall and weighs close to 800 pounds. The Afro pick, as Thomas notes, “exists today as many things to different people: it is worn as adornment, a political emblem, and signature of collective identity. The Afro pick continues to develop itself as a testament to innovation.” The temporary monument was placed here as a symbol and site, as the artist adds, “to highlight ideas related to community, strength, perseverance, comradeship, and resistance to oppression.” Thomas’ work recalls the scale of Pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects, such as the Clothespin and Paint Torch, while marking the lack of commemorative statues that address equal justice and belonging and drawing a contrast to existing sculptures memorializing figures that perpetuated inequity and violence in their time.

This project was created for Monument Lab: A Public Art and History Project curated by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum and produced by Mural Arts Philadelphia. Monument Lab was premised on central guiding question: What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? From September 16 to November 19, 2017, temporary prototype monuments by 20 artists were installed across 10 sites in Philadelphia’s iconic public squares and neighborhood parks. These site-specific artworks were presented together with research labs housed in shipping containers, where proposals for new monuments were collected from community members. The proposals—more than 5,000 in total—became a dataset of public speculation presented in a final report the city. During the exhibition, the collection was on view at the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.