Hank Willis Thomas’s Sanctuary contribution, titled Keep the Faith Baby, comes from a recent series invoking buttons and slogans from political campaigns and social movements from the last 50 years, removing them from their original context to allow audiences to reinterpret the messaging through a contemporary lens. Thomas remembers encountering a button bearing this particular wording as a child. The phrase, used by New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, originally served to communicate the hope and profound faith that fueled the American civil rights movement. “It may sound trite, but commercialism is the new religion. We are all believers. Even the most radical of us,” Thomas has said. “It’s not propaganda anymore.”
