BY SARAH HEPOLA
Jammie Holmes was in his early 30s when he first learned about something called an “art gallery.” He’d grown up sketching — doodles on a pad, reproductions of family photographs, snatches of story told in pen and ink. But it never struck him as more than a fun way to kill time.
He was raised in Thibodaux, a small and insular city southwest of New Orleans on the bayou. “We talked in swamps, and we talked in sugar cane,” says Holmes (whose first name is pronounced Jay-mee), sitting in his Design District studio where he spends most days. Now 40 years old, Holmes was the middle child of a single mom who worked as a nurse. He came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and if a grown man unaware of art galleries sounds hard to believe, then maybe you don’t know how remote Cajun country can be.
“Go to Thibodaux, ask them, where can I buy some acrylic paint?” Holmes says. “Where can I buy a canvas? They’re gonna ask you, what’s a canvas?”
Holmes spent his 20s working in an oil field — good work, he liked it — but after the well went bust, he moved to Dallas for a job, and that’s when a co-worker noticed those sketches in the margins of his notepad.
“He was like, you should check out the Modern. I was like, modern what?
Founded in 1892, Fort Worth’s Modern was the brainchild of 25 women hoping to bring culture to cattle country, and over the next century, oil and ranching millionaires built the city of Fort Worth into an oasis of fine art. All of that was invisible to Holmes. Kids from Thibodaux knew about basketball and football. Like a lot of resource-strapped parts of the country, kids knew drug culture. Holmes likes to say he grew up in a city of adults; nobody had a childhood.
Holmes Googled the museum. “It took me two months to figure out what I was supposed to wear,” he says, laughing. He imagined a bunch of snooty people in suits. In the end, he wore white Levi’s. And when he walked into his first art show, he discovered Brooklyn-based street artist KAWS, whose exhibition in late 2016 was a pop-culture-inspired mix of paintings, sculptures and toy figurines. “I’m instantly like, wow, I could do this,” says Holmes.
I could do this is a common knee-jerk to modern art, particularly the spatter-paint or abstract variety, but Holmes was correct. He didn’t yet know how to paint, but he soon learned, and more important, in KAWS’ playful collection Holmes saw an entry into a fortress once impenetrable, especially since he hadn’t even known it existed.
A few years later, Jammie Holmes had his own exhibit in the Modern.
Holmes’s studio is a cavernous room filled with huge canvases in various degrees of completion. A long horizontal painting reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds IV turned out to be a watermelon patch with the melons still unpainted. I recognized a few pieces from Holmes’ Instagram: In one, an older Black gentleman in a fur coat sits next to a rooster. Currently on the easel was a painting of a Doberman pinscher, ears erect. (“My fave muse,” Holmes wrote on Instagram.)
To understand how an artist could go from his first art show visit to his first solo show in a span shorter than the Obama presidency, it helps to understand Instagram. By 2017, Instagram had blown the doors off the old-fashioned experience of viewing art. No entry fees, no velvet ropes, just direct access to artists and their work. KAWS was one of a new breed of art-world scenesters (like Banksy and Shepard Fairey) using social media to reach mass audiences, as well as very 21st-century collectors. Pharrell Williams and Kid Cudi are among the eclectic owners of KAWS’ work. Holmes took notes. “I won’t do anything without planning,” he tells me, as I sit on a comfy ‘70s-era couch in the studio, and he pulls up a red rolling chair across from me. In person, he’s a curious mix of chatty and no-nonsense. “I can’t stand wasting time. Time is the only thing you can’t get back.”
The next part of his rise came quickly. After a few months, he had paintings — but no idea what to do with them. He turned to a realtor friend in Houston, a woman. Holmes was raised by women; he trusts their advice above men’s. She was the one who got him on Instagram (and LinkedIn, oddly enough). “Think like a celebrity,” she told him, “if you wanna sell to a celebrity.”
Holmes figured if he were famous, he’d use Instagram while everyone else was asleep, a low-key stealth mode. He stayed up late, poked around. At the time, Instagram allowed users to see the activity of people they followed. Holmes started connecting the dots: what got attention, what various entrepreneurs liked. He posted pictures of his work in the wee hours, hoping to cross the radar of certain taste makers. It worked.
Atlanta hip-hop mogul Kevin “Coach K” Lee is known for mentoring rap artists like Migos and Lil Yachty and collecting the work of Black artists. “Man, I really like that painting,” Holmes remembers Coach K telling him. It was a little boy on a bicycle, a book where his face would normally be. (Holmes hadn’t learned how to paint faces yet.)
In an interview with BET, Lee explained why the painting moved him. “Learning to ride a bike is one of the most innocent things in the world,” he tells the camera, “because you try, and you try, and you try. And then you finally get it.”
Holmes was getting it, too. He caught the attention of galleries in New York and Detroit. A mutual acquaintance, the Austin painter Dave McClinton, met Holmes at Dallas’ Other Art Fair back in 2019. “He was already a fully fledged artist and had a focus I admired,” McClinton told me. After — what? Two years at this point?
“I started operating out of fear,” Holmes tells me. He’d quit his job by then. He has two sons back in Thibodaux; there was no room for failure. “I looked at it like a business more than anything,” he says. “And I had a vision of what I wanted to do from the get-go.”
Holmes had a media breakthrough in the chaotic summer of 2020. A few weeks after the death of George Floyd, Holmes (collaborating with Detroit gallery Library Street Collective) flew planes over five different cities, including Dallas, trailing banners that read “Please I can’t breathe” and “My neck hurts.” Floyd’s final words. The aerial protest was so mysterious, so eye-catching, that Holmes was profiled in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
“Racism is fear,” he says. “Not knowing the other person.” One nice thing about Thibodaux was how connected everyone was. The city might be best known for the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre, when between 35 and 50 Black people were killed in a sugar-cane labor dispute. But by the time Holmes grew up, race relations had eased — maybe because they were actual relations. As he sees it, when cops actually live in the city they police, and when would-be thieves actually break bread with the neighbors — they are less likely to act out of self-interest, malice or cruelty. “You don’t want to ransack a house and then, like, run into those people later that day,” he says.
The Floyd aerial demonstration gave him a reputation as a political artist, though he doesn’t think of himself that way. He sees himself as a “visual poet.” Human stories told through shapes and paint. Moments captured in acrylic. A group of men carrying a coffin. A man lying on an emerald couch, staring into what seems to be the void of his own future. A self-portrait of Holmes at MLK Park in South Dallas, sitting atop a picnic bench.
In summer 2023, Holmes landed his solo show at the Modern in Fort Worth, titled “Make the Revolution Irresistible.” One painting from that collection struck me when I saw it on Instagram: Four Black soldiers in the jungle, fists raised. “This reminds me of Da 5 Bloods,” I told him, referring to Spike Lee’s 2020 movie, but he’d never seen it. Holmes had been inspired by Vietnam stories that his mom’s ex-husband told him. I was struck by the fact that a relatively common image — Black men, army fatigues — had been rendered singular to me, because I saw it so rarely in pop culture. Black man in pulpit, Black man in bar, Black man lighting a cigarette: Were they political images, or just portraits of American life?
Holmes’ paintings have been acquired by the Modern and the Dallas Museum of Art, as well as Detroit’s Library Street Collective and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City, though the casual observer can always just follow him on Instagram. When I first reached out, he was prepping for Art Basel in Hong Kong, which took place earlier this spring.
“There ain’t no plan B for me,” he tells me. ”This has to work.”
And it’s working exceptionally well so far. He has no plans to move out of Plano, where he lives with his fiancée. Dallas-Fort Worth is convenient, less expensive than the coasts, although he’s spending part of 2024 in L.A. and plans to spend part of 2025 in New York. He also returns to Thibodaux regularly to see his sons, family and old stomping grounds.
He started a summer camp for kids. In 2021, when a hurricane struck Thibodaux, Holmes donated generators.
He’s a far cry from the 30-something who’d never heard of an art gallery. His life has been lucky; he knows that. “I’m like man, I get to paint for a living. I’m not ducking bullets.” He gave money to his high-school art program and bought tons of arts supplies.
These days, if you go to Thibodaux and ask around for the acrylic paint, or the canvas, they might not be so confused. Over there, a kid might say, pointing toward a school. Jammie Holmes sent them.
