The Armory Show: Jammie Holmes | A Few Great Men

For inquiries, please contact director Beryl Bevilacque:

beryl@boeskygallery.com

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Jammie Holmes’s monumental painting, A Few Great Men (2024), for the Focus section of The Armory Show 2025. Curated by Jessica Bell Brown, Armory Focus highlights artists and galleries from the American South. 

Throughout his intimate, intuitive paintings, Jammie Holmes (b. 1984, Thibodaux, LA) presents poignant scenes of Black families, communities, and traditions in the American South, drawing on memory to capture moments of celebration and struggle. Incorporating portraiture, symbolism, and written text into his work, Holmes intersperses reflections on social, cultural, and political concerns with deeply felt meditations on notions of family, home, and Blackness. With A Few Great Men, Holmes incorporates a series of symbols and motifs that appear throughout his practice into a monumental, thirteen-foot statement about identity, history, and legacy. 

Across the length of the exaggeratedly horizontal canvas, Holmes depicts a group of anonymized Black Panther Party members rendered in grisaille. Below—arising from somewhere beneath the painting, a row of sepia-toned morning glory flowers bloom. On the far left-hand side, Holmes includes a copy of Kerry James Marshall’sfamed 1980 A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, an investigation of the experience of blackness and of the color black itself. At the center of the painting, a punching fist appears as if from behind the paintings, Holmes cleverly engaging and using a trompe-l'oeil technique to render the canvas punctured by the action. On the fist, a two-finger cameo ring bears portraits of the artist and of the author James Baldwin.

Layered with such rich imagery and symbolism and incorporating loaded, Renaissance painting techniques, A Few Great Men operates as an homage to black history—an altarpiece exalting all those who advanced the rights and dignity of Black Americans. Holmes takes particular care with this work to honor those whose names aren’t found in history books—but who drove change in small, community-oriented ways. By including anonymous portraits of Black Panthers, the artist references the party’s community-oriented Survival Programs, like free breakfast, health clinics, and political education. The ghostly, sepia-toned morning glories running along the bottom of the canvas honor all those who lost their lives too soon amidst the ongoing struggle for freedom. For Holmes, A Few Great Men is the opportunity to honor the ordinary people who contribute toward the ongoing work of justice. 

ABOUT JAMMIE HOLMES

Holmes’s first solo museum exhibition, Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible, was presented at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX in 2023. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including: Afro-Atlantic Histories, which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Dallas Museum of Art, TX. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the China Center of International Contemporary Art Vancouver, Canada; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Dallas Contemporary, TX; and Nassima-Landau Projects, Tel Aviv, Israel. Work by Holmes is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; ICA Miami, FL; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LA; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; X Museum, Beijing, China; and the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China. Holmes lives and works in Miami, FL.