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Ekua Holmes (born in 1955) is a native of Roxbury, MA and a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). Holmes layers newspaper, photos, fabric, and other materials to create luminous compositions. Many of her artworks evoke her childhood in Roxbury’s Washington Park neighborhood in Boston, MA. Ekua is currently working in Boston as an assistant director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Education
Holmes has a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Career and Work
Holmes has created and led workshops, has been a visiting artist and lecturer, and has held artist residencies in public and private institutions throughout New England. Her first children’s book, Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, went on to win a raft of accolades in 2016, including a Caldecott Honor, a Robert F. Sibert Honor, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Nonfiction Honor. She is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a nomination for the Brother Thomas Award from the Boston Foundation.

Since her first exhibition in 2000, Renewal and Regeneration, at the Museum of Our National Heritage, Lexington, MA, Holmes has been the subject of several exhibitions including Second Childhood, which was installed in 2004 at the Hess Gallery of Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, MA. Her work has since been showcased in numerous invitational, solo, and group exhibitions in galleries throughout the New England area. In 2004 the Museum of the National Center of Afro American Artists acquired her collage titled “Goree,” and since then Holmes’ works have been added to the collections of the Willis Cultural Center in Worcester, MA, Boston Medical Center, The Boston Arts Academy, Dana Farber Cancer Center and the Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as numerous private collections. About her work, Holmes said, “In everything I create I hear them saying, ‘Remember Me,’ and through my work I honor their legacies by bringing them forward to life with torn and cut shapes of found colors and textures. With these scraps and remnants, assembled like a down-home quilt, I rebuild my world, putting in what speaks to my personal and cultural narrative.”

In 2013, Holmes was named to the Boston Art Commission, which oversees public art projects on city property. In 2015, she installed a community-based work for an opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, which was comprised of a gigantic interactive collage with scenes of Boston in transition, designed to complement the ICA group show, “When the Stars Begin to Fall.” On Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2015, Holmes’s Google Doodle illustration honoring the civil rights leader is the featured image on Google’s US homepage. The collage depicts King walking arm in arm with fellow activists in Selma, Alabama.