Tells the Story of the South

THE MODERN’S MAKE THE REVOLUTION IRRESISTIBLE MARKS THE FIRST SOLO MUSEUM EXHIBITION FOR THE THIBODEAUX-BORN, DALLAS-BASED ARTIST.

BY ALYSIA NICOLE HARRIS

Make the Revolution Irresistible, the first solo museum exhibition for Dallas-based artist Jammie Holmes, presents large-scale paintings featuring intimately poetic recollections of homeplace and history. Space and time are raw materials, but home is what happens when an individual builds an identifying relationship with a particular place and its people. Within Holmes’ history-sized paintings, the artist introduces a personal codex of cultural symbols: sparrows, digital clocks, RIP T-shirts, church fans, and box fans that serve to identify, document, and monumentalize Black life in the rural South.

“I’m telling the story of the South,” said 39-year-old Holmes during a studio visit as he worked on a life-sized installation of a one-room country chapel for the exhibition’s August 10 opening at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. “I like to put myself as a stand-in to symbolize home, [so] people that know me from Dallas to Thibodeaux—they could feel like they are included.”

Utilizing auto-portraiture as a kind of visual metonym for his hometown of Thibodeaux, Louisiana, Holmes succeeds in the creation of deeply subjective and deeply Southern compositions. The self-taught painter left still-segregated Thibodeaux and moved to Dallas seven years ago, hoping to find more for himself and his two young sons, Myles and Kingston. “Some people, it just goes over their head. They don’t really get how deep South I was, to where I never heard the term ‘art museum’ in my life. I heard of a museum, but I thought a museum was dinosaurs, coins, f***ing slavery, stuff like that…but I didn’t know there was a specific place for paintings,” admitted Holmes.

Presciently, a 2017 trip to the Modern launched Holmes into painting. “I feel like it was destiny for me to do my first solo exhibition at the first museum I walked into. [ Make the Revolution Irresistible] is my welcoming packet.”

Curator María Elena Ortiz, who helped organize the exhibition, feels that a museum show for the artist has been long overdue given his prolific production and commercial success. “He has all the checkmarks: He has solid work; he’s heavily collected by reputable collections, and not only in the US, but also in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe; he’s also showing a lot and has a New York gallery—all the things that artists die to have.”

Ortiz believes it’s a museum’s responsibility to make images like Holmes’ accessible to the larger world. “Museums can really step in to make [these images]— not cultural heritage in the old way—but part of our moment, part of the cultural production. People also need to understand that these images are part of our culture,” she stated.

Recently, images of Black figuration have proliferated, with increased visibility of artists like Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald working within Black portraiture. However, the somber beauty of Holmes’ Black Southern tableaux is distinctive, complicated by graphic gestures that create portals of psychic and temporal disruption within the canvas. Endurance, 2020, features the artist cutting a friend’s hair back home in Thibodeaux. Small loose strokes of white paint pock the foreground outside what appears to be a trailer-style home. Chicken scratch calculations of money—bills or expenses— appear toward the lower left corner, letting us know that the scene is a composite of memories, thoughts, and emotions. Initially, the painting suggests we are outside the house, but the outlet box, the checkered kitchen floor, and the rough sketch of a houseplant and tiny window suggest the scene takes place inside. By jumbling the picture plane, Holmes creates a dreamlike streamof-consciousness aesthetic and conveys the liminal precarity and out-of-placeness that Black Southerners often feel, even at home.

In self-described personal works like BOX FAN HEROES, 2019, or Property Tax, 2020, the expressive gestures link Holmes to Black neo-expressionists like Basquiat and contemporary devotional portrait artist Genesis Tramaine. Devoid of the frenetic and sardonic impulses of Basquiat and less abstract than the ecstatic visions of Tramaine, a breezy swath of color or element of marginalia within Holmes’ lifescapes suffuse his work with an emotive power that releases the hidden poetics at the core of everyday life in the Black South.

Each of these artists developed their sui generis approach to painting from practices of sketching, graffiti tagging, comic illustration, or doodling. But one must be careful when assuming any influences on Holmes’ work. “It’s harder to analyze him in the traditional way of looking at specific [artistic] references because he’s learning about references as we go,” said Ortiz.

Viewers will witness Holmes’ evolving relationship with the canvas as they study the 15 works selected for the show. Graphic gestures are more dominant in earlier works. The canvas still operates like a sketchpad where perspective, portraiture, notes, loose drawings, and other marginalia are collapsed on the two- dimensional surface. However, we see the restraint of the graphic idiom in recent works from this year, like Lefty, 2023. In Zebra in the Room, 2023, this element completely disappears in favor of an intricate depiction of a surrealist scene.

The scale of the works alone makes clear these paintings of home are also paintings of history. “If you go to the National Gallery and walk to the Portrait Gallery, those are huge portraits. You want [viewers] to really home in on the monumentality of the people that are being depicted. And I think that he’s building on that trope to honor and highlight how the stories that he portrays require the same type of space as others have in the past,” said Ortiz.

The exhibition’s title is a partial quote from author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, who said, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” This choice reveals how Holmes uses art both as a means of subjective expression and contemplation and historical intervention. His paintings represent, remember, and remind. And even when images like Fred Hampton, 2022, include subversive statements about political and cultural allegiance, they still lovingly function as odes.

“I just felt like 300 years from now, this would be hieroglyphics,” said Holmes. “So that’s why I’ve tried to give roses to the people that needs to [receive them]—like Fred Hampton over there, Obama, and Martin Luther King. It’s important that I give roses to these people before we—I don’t want people to forget about them.” P