{"id":6239,"date":"2019-12-18T09:58:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T09:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=6239"},"modified":"2019-12-18T17:05:17","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T17:05:17","slug":"for-and-about-the-people-robin-holder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=6239","title":{"rendered":"For and About the People: Robin Holder\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

For and About the People: Robin Holder\u00a0<\/b><\/h1>\n
by Halima Taha<\/span><\/pre>\n
Do you have hope for the future?\u00a0 Do you think American lives are more important than the lives of\u00a0 people from other nations? Do you think your basic rights are being eroded?\u00a0 Do you think a society where one out of nine young black men are in prisons is acceptable? Does cultural identity\u00a0 mean that it contradicts the national identity of citizenship? These are some of the questions that many Americans are asking about the United States during\u00a0 Donald J. Trump\u2019s presidency. They are also the same questions that Robin Holder explores as part of a process for her artistic activism in <\/span>Access & Inequities. I Hear You. Do You See Me?\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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No Chinese Allowed, Catholics Not Welcome 2019 by Robin Holder 50_ x 30_ colored pencil, acrylic paint, archival inkjet print<\/p><\/div>\n
The ideal of people from seven continents living in the United States as social equals has always drawn its greatest\u00a0 power, not from legislature or legislation, but from individual sincerity and symbolic action\u2014not\u00a0 from the Supreme Court landmark decree that separate is inherently unequal in the Brown vs Board of Education decision in 1954, but\u00a0 by the brandishing image of national Guardsmen escorting tender faced black high school students through a venomous crowd of white bigotry and fear. \u00a0 Perhaps this accounts for the powerful visual impact of the contradictions in America\u2019s relationship with black and brown people, that enables the work of\u00a0 Robin Holder to connect diverse audiences. Her innovative, integrated and layered use of monoprints, photo lithographs, linoleum block, serigraph, stencil, foil and\u00a0 transfer printing with painting, drawing and collage presents an accessible vocabulary for cultural and social literacy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Access &\u00a0 Inequities.\u00a0 I Hear You. Do You See Me?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 is comprised of 35 works on paper that summon viewers to reflect upon the American ideal which posits a society in which everyone gains personal freedom and opportunity by trading their individual ethnic identity for a national identity. Holder contends both distinctions can simultaneously remain intact. When citizens pause, interact, and consider how mortal similarities and differences critically strengthen communities, they shape a world that encourages inclusion and a greater humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Irish Need Not Apply, No Negroes, No Dogs by robin holder 2019 50_ x 30_ colored pencil, acrylic paint, archival inkjet print copy<\/p><\/div>\n
Holder\u2019s work challenges power hierarchies through a dynamic and thoughtful practice that incites responses to encourage people to make compelling intellectual shifts, resulting in honest interactions. People begin to listen, see and accept one another from a place of self-reflective understanding. This exhibition includes select works from three ongoing thematic series. Set on a global stage, upon which human behavior is featured with dramatic conflicts in the characterizations of equity, race, class, ethics, language, privilege and citizenship. Holder states \u201cMy work is motivated by my multi-cultural background, in which layers upon layers of\u00a0 various racial, economic and spiritual worlds exist within one family.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
The series <\/span>Behind Each Window: A Voice <\/span><\/i>explores which foreign born residents\u00a0 become the entitled Americans and who remains the disenfranchised.\u00a0 These works are informed by oral biographies with Holder\u2019s Brooklyn neighbors. They struggled with having to adapt and alter their own traditions in order to assimilate\u00a0 into a new American culture. What is it about immigrants to America that makes them more or less valuable to this country and its citizens? Is it the color of their skin, religious beliefs, suffering or lack thereof?\u00a0 Are immigrants more valuable to the people they left behind or less valuable to the cultural heritage of a new country that has benefited from their labor, ideas and culture?<\/span><\/p>\n
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Equal Under the Law_ from USA The United States of Anxiety 2018 by robin holder 36_ x 35_ colored pencil, acrylic paint, archival inkjet print<\/p><\/div>\n
In the <\/span>USA -United States of Anxiety<\/span><\/i> series, Holder creates lopsided\u00a0 houses as a metaphor for the deterioration of a balanced and integrated country.\u00a0 The distraught faces reflect the fear, confusion and depression of its inhabitants grappling with the unsettling reality of losing or being unable to attain the American dream. Holder wants you to\u00a0 pay attention to the complexities that delineate income, education, race and power. These social lines of demarcation are juxtaposed with daily inequities\u00a0 that reflect the necessity to attain freedom from strictures of class, gender, race and history.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
The\u00a0 Falling\u00a0 Figures <\/span><\/i>series<\/span> addresses the\u00a0 current decline of civilization and how humanity is losing its grasp on this reality. Figures plunging\u00a0 away from healthy values that characterize a civil society is analogous to barbarism and anomie. Corporate and big pharma greed, poor education and health care, mediocrity and status quo has overwhelmed people. Poor, working class and the nearly middle class are fighting amongst themselves over race and religion, despite being pushed out of\u00a0 neighborhoods, schools, and services because they can\u2019t afford them. The provocateurs have successfully distracted them from the essential issues for survival, as they continue to destroy families and communities. Eroding human dignity aka terrorism, is a new American pastime directed at immigrants and citizens.\u00a0 These American terrorists are Christian white men, not Muslim, brown or black people. These hurtful and elite biases are based on irrational fear, blind ignorance and the belief that everything contrary to an arrogant Eurocentric worldview has no validity.<\/span><\/p>\n
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We Are Here 2019 by robin holder 54_ x 44_ colored pencil, acrylic paint, archival inkjet print<\/p><\/div>\n
Holder\u2019s picture narratives are infused with the substance and integrity that her subjects command.\u00a0 Using her ideas and materials as a catalyst for dialogue is her greatest strength because her work inspires people to change their communities from the influences of the worst societal injustices. \u00a0 The work of muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfonso Siqueiros colored her approach to imagery with political undertones to change unacceptable conditions of inequity between rich and poor people.\u00a0 Holder, like many American artists of African descent, felt a profound affinity for everything the Mexican muralists expressed from the need for equality to the longing for cultural completeness.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Herein lies a prime example of how artistic activism functions as an expression of affect. The power of the imagery motivates people to overcome seemingly impermeable socio-political and moral barriers so they can successfully remap society\u2019s pernicious patterns with a healthy blueprint. This affect in artistic activism combined with activism mobilizes change with effect and becomes a powerful tool to communicate social, civic and economic ideology to engage dialog.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
To this end, Holder\u2019s work validates paradoxical ideas in which she can meld two or more views, events, or concepts that briefly appear inconsistent, absurd or contradictory.\u00a0 Together they operate as distinct continuing forces that are aspects of one reality. This consciousness is aware of duality and difference, yet she does not differentiate one concept as being qualitatively distinctive from another. Her thinking is paradoxical like a mirror that presents a kaleidoscope of simultaneous, inclusive and divergent realities that are exposed by her inquiry, \u201cDo you See Me?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Holder\u2019s\u00a0 focus on memory, language and identity, juxtaposed with the effects of\u00a0 global migration and the politics of civil, cultural, economic and gender wars, nourishes universal concerns that challenge notions of\u00a0 what it is to be civilized.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Halima Taha, writer, arts & cultural strategist and author of\u00a0 <\/span>Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas.<\/span><\/p>\n
OPENING JAN. 12: ROBIN HOLDER, ACCESS & INEQUITIES: I HEAR YOU. DO YOU SEE ME?<\/a><\/span>
\nat Kentler International Drawing Space<\/span><\/h5>\n
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