Artist Overview | Jammie Holmes

In Fred Hampton, Jammie Holmes brings his wide-ranging concerns together into a cohesive visual narrative. Balancing the political and the personal, the iconographic with the expressionistic, the work exemplifies Holmes’s juxtaposition of his own affective memory with his ongoing political development. The painting is bordered in a series of Pan-Africanist flags, into which Jammie has inserted a flag of his own design, staking a claim within a cultural and political lineage. Unlike the other flags, which are purely abstract, Holmes’s flag depicts a pair of eyes on a black field –– a direct exhortation to viewers to expand their perspective.. As Holmes says, “The flags are a group of pan-African flags created by African Americans including the flag I created. My flag symbolizes the idea of seeing the world through the eyes of a black person.”

At the center of the composition, framed by a television set (which is itself framed by the flags) is a depiction of Fred Hampton, a young leader in the Black Panther Party who was murdered by Chicago Police in 1969, at the age of 21. Atop the tv set rests a portrait from Holmes’s childhood of himself and his siblings –– making it clear that these major political ideas are a part of everyday family life. Holmes has said that the image is imagined as being from the viewpoint of his mother as she watches television in his childhood home, underscoring the unwavering familial, subjective positioning of his gaze.

In this monumental work, Holmes deploys a series of thematic and visual interactions with the stated aim of shifting social perceptions of Black men, specifically. The composition centers around a casual game of dice, an example of the social and communal practices at the heart of Black American life that Holmes often foregrounds in his work; musical notes floating above the game emphasize the joys and cultural creativity of this social life. Structurally, the entire work is balanced on the die at the center of the canvas imbuing this small quotidian object with metaphorical weight.

The scope of the canvas reflects Holmes’s deft blending of themes, materials, and vocabularies. The figure at the left of the canvas is Holmes himself, one of the self-portraits he includes frequently in his work, emphasizing the deeply personal and subjective nature of his tableaux. It is counterbalanced by a depiction of a child at the right, whose blue background could equally suggest a school photograph or a funeral portrait. This connection between the adult men on one side of the canvas, depicted in varying degrees of profile at their dice game, and the child gazing full face at the viewer, emphasizes the social dehumanization of Black men, a dehumanization that robs Black children of their childhood. As Holmes says, “Everyone is someone’s child.”

Jammie Holmes’s compositions are dense with meaning and allusion. The work rewards sustained engagement because the artist’s motifs shift and evolve from work to work, coming together in varied configurations that enrich his meticulously structured compositions. Just Like Your Father reflects several key themes in Holmes’s practice:

Family, Black culture, notions of value and status, anticipatory mourning, mark- making as signature, the strong links between memory and place.

The subject is a mother-and-child pair, an immediate connection to the Madonna and child of canonical Western painting since the middle ages. Here, the child occupies the position often held by the figure of the adult Holmes in his paintings, including the sliver of a gold chain above his t-shirt. The child’s shirt is familiar from other paintings, but here, unusually, a face is depicted in the frame, perhaps alluding to the father in the title. Nonetheless, there is an ambiguity in the position of the eponymous father, as the mother’s pose –– familiar to anyone who has tried to encourage a baby to look at the camera –– places the viewer in the position of photographer, evoking a feeling of familial intimacy and prompting the question of whether the father is being memorialized in the child’s shirt, or taking a photograph for someone else’s memorial.