Stories, Activism and Dreams: The Collages of Ekua Holmes

Saturday, December 10, 2022, 8PM 

Ekua Holmes

Ekua Holmes is a distinguished artist, children’s book illustrator and community-builder (see her work on the Roxbury Sunflower Project, begun in 2018, https://roxburysunflowerproject.tumblr.com/).

She’s a resident of  Roxbury, and she illustrates joyful Black life there and elsewhere in works such as Dream Street, Black is a Rainbow Color, and Out of Wonder, which won the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award.   She also illustrated Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, by Carole Boston Weatherford, which won many honors, including a Caldecott, in 2016.

In  2021-2022, the MFA mounted a solo exhibition, “Paper Stories, Layered Dreams: The Art of Ekua Holmes.”

Collage, Holmes’ primary medium, allows her to splice timelines and traditions, new with old, soft with hard, personal with universal, to express the endless possibilities of complex stories.  In her research on the extraordinary women whose lives she portrays, she finds poignant examples of love and legacy that animate her illustrations and inspire readers of all generations.