About: Ekua Holmes
“Ekua Holmes frequently draws her subject from her experiences growing up in Roxbury. She has perfected collage as a medium through which she excellently exploits rich color, superior compositions, and surprising textural relationships.”
Ekua Holmes’ work is collage based and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, the power of hope, faith, and self-determination. Recalling a quote from American Artist, Romare Bearden, "I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window," Holmes has looked out of her window for the subjects of her collages too. Remembering a Roxbury childhood of wonder and delight she considers herself a part of a long line of Roxbury imagemakers. In this spirit, she supports those who have a calling in the arts as well as keeping her own studio practice ignited. She has created and led workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held artist residencies in public and private institutions throughout New England. In her first public art initiative, she received a Now + There Public Art Accelerator Fellowship and launched The Roxbury Sunflower Project (#RoxburySunflowerProject), in which she facilitated the planting of 10,000 sunflower seeds in her native Roxbury, MA.
For her work in illustrating children’s literature, Holmes is the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King’s John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, Robert Siebert and Horn Book awards for her illustrations in “Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement" by Carole Boston Weatherford, her first illustration project. In 2018, she won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration for the book, "Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets." In 2019 she won the 2019 Coretta Scott King Award again for her illustrations in “Stuff of Stars,” written by Marion Dane Bauer.
Ms. Holmes currently serves as Commissioner and Vice-Chair of the Boston Art Commission, which oversees the placement and maintenance of public works of art on and in City of Boston properties. She is also currently Associate Director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at MassArt where she manages and coordinates sparc! the ArtMobile, an art-inspiring, art-transforming vehicle retrofitted to contribute to community-based, multidisciplinary arts programming currently focused in Mission Hill, Roxbury, and Dorchester, MA. Ekua Holmes received her BFA in Photography from MassArt in 1977.
