Photo: Daisy Avalos
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. There is a delicate balance between the personal and the political in Holmes’s oeuvre: He is a storyteller whose determination to imbue his work with his own subjective, lived experience is itself a subtle, effective political gesture.
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 Dallas, TX.