Jammie Holmes is a self-taught artist from Thibodaux, Louisiana, whose paintings draw deeply from personal memory to illuminate broader narratives of Black life in the Southern part of America. His work captures everyday moments, such as birthdays, mourning rituals, domestic interiors, shared meals etc. It renders them with both tenderness and formal precision. Holmes’s practice is rooted in storytelling, but it is also an act of witnessing: of asking who gets seen, who gets remembered, and how.
Cake (2024) brings together two of Holmes’s most resonant motifs: the flower and the flag. The flower, adorned with large, watchful eyes, is Holmes’s invented character “Goldie” a recurring presence in his recent works that fuses beauty with surveillance, vulnerability with vigilance. The eyes are more than symbolic; they are Holmes’s insistence that Black life not only be remembered, but seen fully, presently, and on its own terms.
The cake itself carries Holmes’s signature flag design: a pair of inverted white arches (evoking his eyes) framed by a boxed-in star. The black background surrounding the arches represents his skin, grounding the imagery in embodiment and identity. Inside the cake, the red and green layers quietly invoke Pan-African colors, linking the personal to the political, the individual to the collective.
Formally rich and materially lush—with glitter and gold leaf accentuating the surface—Cake is both celebration and assertion. Holmes’s compositions operate between the ceremonial and the everyday, fusing ornament with urgency. The painting invites reflection on visibility, inheritance, and the layered codes embedded in Southern Black life.
Jammie Holmes' work has also been included in landmark group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Dallas Museum of Art, and Rubell Museum, among others. Holmes’ paintings are held in prestigious public collections worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Perez Art Museum Miami, New Orleans Museum of Art, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and international institutions such as the X Museum in Beijing, Pond Society in Shanghai, and the Nassima Landau Foundation in Tel Aviv.
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The artist
