American painter Jammie Holmes puts his memories of growing up in the Deep South onto the canvas, interrogating the reality of Blackness in America.
Read MoreJammie Holmes was born in 1984 in Thibodeaux, Louisiana. His hometown is best known as the site of the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887, in which Black families were killed after a strike over the conditions at sugar cane plantations. The racial violence of America's past and present was a prominent element in Holmes' environment as a child and is therefore a major influence in his paintings today.
Holmes is a self-taught artist, having previously worked in the oil fields of Louisiana before turning to painting full-time. He has lived and worked in Dallas, Texas since 2016, although his practice heavily focuses on his childhood growing up in Louisiana.
Jammie Holmes chiefly works from memories, painting scenes from his boyhood, especially of family and community in his hometown of Thibodeaux. Self-portraits of Holmes can often be found in his work, highlighting the immensely personal and intimate nature of his oeuvre. The importance of faith in Holmes' childhood and in Southern Black communities more generally is another ongoing theme of his work; the image of the Bible is a motif that runs through his paintings.
Other symbols include sparrows, representative of freedom for the artist, as well as a reminder of the birds that frequented his grandmother's backyard. Red flowers are another major presence, aimed at humanising the Black men portrayed in his paintings, thereby countering the stereotype of Black men as threatening or hypermasculine.
His earlier work incorporates text and symbols in a Neo-expressionist aesthetic with acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Later work shows the influence of pioneering Black figurative painters like Kerry James Marshall in their focus on naturalistic, prominent portraits. He is also heavily influenced by folk art, such as Black Louisiana folk artist Clementine Hunter.
Jammie Holmes' practice extended beyond painting to public, activist art with They're Going to Kill Me (2020). This powerful and important aerial demonstration was implemented in collaboration with his gallery Library Street Collective in response to the murder of George Floyd in police custody in May 2020. In New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami and Dallas, planes flew across the sky, each with a banner stating an excerpt of Floyd's final words.
Other public work includes Universal Language, the artist's first mural, in Belt Alley in Detroit, Michigan. This large-scale mural, over twenty-six feet long, speaks to the 'universal language' of childhood and play, featuring a Black child doing backflips on a discarded mattress.
Jammie Holmes had never visited a museum before moving to Dallas and visiting the Dallas Museum of Art. Yet, as his career has developed, he aims to get his work into museum collections and ultimately make museums more relatable and comfortable for Black people to visit and see their likeness on the walls.
Since his career took off in 2016, he has regularly succeeded in this goal, with work having been acquired by many public collections. Some examples include the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; and X Museum, Beijing, China.
Jammie Holmes has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: What happened to the soul food?, Gana Art Center, Seoul (2022); Pieces of a Man, Library Street Collective, Detroit, Michigan (2021); Anatomy: Jammie Holmes, Library Street Collective, Detroit, Michigan (2020); and Everything Hurts, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2020).
Group exhibitions include: Recent Acquisitions 2002–2022, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2022); Afro-Atlantic Histories, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas (2021–22); In Relation to Power: Politically Engaged Works from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, New Hampshire (2021); High Voltage, Nassima, Landau Projects, Tel Aviv (2020); and To Be Determined, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas (2020).
Jammie Holmes has sold regularly on the auction market since his debut at Christie's New York in December 2020, where his painting Balloon Happy (2020) sold for $38,000. The artist's record at time of writing was made in May 2021, when First Birthday (2020) sold for over $150,000 at Christie's Hong Kong.
Jammie Holmes' website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Articles on Jammie Holmes have been published in various publications, including Creative Boom, Frieze, and Art in America.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
