Michael Holman

Michael Holman explores, confronts, and seeks to demystify the power and complexity of symbols.  One symbol in particular, the Confederate flag. The artist’s paintings of Confederate flags, rendered in gold and silver leaf, acrylic, flock, and layered gesso, challenge the viewer: who “owns” a symbol and how does it gain meaning?  The artist’s paintings are graphic, bold, and disruptive. They are visually minimal, yet impossible to experience disassociated from feelings of bewilderment.

Holman’s exploration is not only a present, personal search, but one that extends directly to his ancestry – he is the great-great-grandson of an enslaved African American who fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy. Family archives from mid-1800s, including pension slips, are documented in the artist’s paintings, Native and Silver Cross, whereas works like Seven/Eleven and LV Native place the Confederate flag in contemporary, consumer culture, associating it with both high-brow luxury goods and gas-station paraphernalia.

An influential observer of popular culture and entertainment, Holman is a filmmaker, artist, writer, and musician, formerly based in New York City, but recently returned to Los Angeles.  A pioneer in the Downtown New York Art Scene and Uptown Hip Hop Scene, Holman founded the band Gray – an industrial, atmospheric, noise group  – with painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; as well as    created and produced the first Hip Hop television show, Graffiti Rock in 1984.  His work has been shown in eminent art institutions, from Art Basel Miami to the Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland and Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris.  In 2016, Holman’s music archives and artifacts were acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division in Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.  In addition to working on new art pieces, Holman is currently working on a Broadway musical called Beat Street with the artist Nas.

Fine arts:

Holman created installation art at the Mudd Club, notably The Soul Party in 1980.

Working as a fine artist, Holman deconstructs social-political symbolism on canvas.  His paintings were shown at the Massey/Klein Gallery (2018), and Miami Art Basel in 2007 and 2008, and the Spring Break Show in New York City.

Holman’s archives were acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division in 2016.  In the same year, a few of Holman’s artifacts from the 1980s were acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Accolades:

Holman received the Paulette Goddard Award, Best Film, NYU, for Head’s, You Win, in 1987.

He won the Best Video Of The Year from Rolling Stone Magazine for Run DMC music video Christmas In Hollis in 1987.

Filmography:

Graffiti Rock (1984)

New York Beat Movie (1981)