Few artists have looked as unflinchingly at the machinery of American image-making as Hank Willis Thomas. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1976, to a jazz musician father and the photographer and curator Deborah Willis, Thomas grew up inside a conversation about how images work and who they work for. That inheritance runs through everything he makes.

His practice began in photography, sharpened by degrees at NYU and the California College of the Arts, but quickly expanded into something harder to categorize. His B®anded series superimposed the Nike swoosh onto the bodies of Black men, a pointed parallel to the branding of enslaved people. His Unbranded series stripped all logos and text from decades of magazine advertisements featuring African Americans, leaving the images to reveal how thoroughly the advertising industry had commodified Black identity for profit. The gesture was simple. The implications were not.

Raise Up, his permanent installation at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, confronts visitors with the raised arms and upturned faces of coal miners photographed during a humiliating medical examination under South African apartheid. Shortly after the work was completed, the phrase "Hands up, don't shoot" entered the American vernacular in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown. Thomas had already been there.

His collaborative projects extend that reach further still. For Freedoms, which he co-founded in 2016, became the largest creative collaboration in American history, placing work by over 150 artists on billboards across all fifty states. The Embrace, his bronze memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, has stood on Boston Common since 2023.

That a work by Thomas now comes to auction at Christie's as part of The Art of the Game feels consistent with a practice that has never distinguished between the gallery and the street, the monument and the advertisement. Organized alongside the FIFA World Cup 2026™ and guided by a curatorial panel of museum directors from across New York, the initiative found in Thomas an artist who already knew that the most watched moments in the world are also the most instructive ones.