Looking for America belongs to Hank Willis Thomas’s ongoing Punctum series, which merges photography, sculpture, and history. The term punctum describes the emotionally piercing detail in an image that unexpectedly grips the viewer. Here, Thomas responds to Danny Lyon’s 1964 photograph of photographer Clifford Vaughs detained during a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstration in Maryland. By isolating Vaughs’s stretched body in sculptural form, Thomas transforms this specific protest moment into a universal meditation on courage, struggle, and political conviction.