Hank Willis Thomas’s conceptual art practice often questions visual systems and the connections between images and meanings, especially in relation to social and political inequalities. Bars is a quilt made of decommissioned black-and-white striped prison uniforms. Striped uniforms, with their reference to the bars of a prison cell, were prevalent in the early 19th century.

The uniforms visually marked wearers as criminals, drawing a neat line between the supposedly guilty and the innocent in society, while also stigmatizing prisoners. Though this striped design is no longer in use, the quilt is a reminder that this history has been stitched into our visual landscape and cultural imagining of criminality.

If the Leader Only Knew is part of Hank Willis Thomas’s “Punctum” series of works, made from imagery found in twentieth-century German publications and archives. This sculpture depicts small, child-sized hands grasping onto a barbed wire. Sourced from a photograph of prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp, but removed from that historical context and cast in bronze, the hands evoke the history of the Holocaust as well as other racialized histories of internment and concentration camps, including the rampant incarceration of people of color in the United States.

Black men are six times and Hispanic men are 2.7 times as likely to be imprisoned as white men; Native Americans constitute the largest incarcerated population per capita; Black women the fastest growing incarcerated population; and one out of every two Black transgender individuals are jailed at some point in their lives. Thomas’s powerful bronze sculpture casts the current state apparatuses of prisons, jails, and detention centers within a wider history of racism and dehumanization.