ROBIN HOLDER

Robin Holder is best described as a socio-cultural artist. Holder is known for her mixed-media printmaking, paintings, and site-specific works, which employ a combination of techniques to create social justice narratives that explore painful cultural, racial, social, and religious conflicts. Her work is motivated by her multi-cultural background in which layers upon layers of various racial, economic, cultural, and spiritual worlds exist within one family. 

Growing up in a biracial and multiethnic family, Holder has had to create a visual dialogue that reflects her diverse heritage. Artmaking became a vehicle for experimentation, exploration, and communication. This visual language is rooted in her use of archetypal symbols of rituals and tools, often used in the battle for wisdom, tolerance, and growth, and found layered throughout her paintings, prints, digital images, and drawings. Her images inspire community conversation and address the challenges faced when building a diverse and equitable society. This formative dialogue is captured both autobiographically and universally by the artist. 

Her practice often includes using material, technique, or procedure she finds unfamiliar. In this way, she can stretch her creative energy beyond the known and discover new approaches to artmaking. Developing images that consider a series of questions, tell stories, reference direct societal events, reflect universal truths, or explore an idea. These images pique her interest in the expansive manifestations of our human experience and explore the complexities of identity.

Holder received a scholarship to The Art Students League of New York from 1969 to 1971, where she studied under Marshall Glasier, Vaclav Vytlacil, Morris Kantor, and Rudolf Baranik. After studying at The Art Students League of New York, Holder moved to Mexico and spent time creating art. She also worked for the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier studying lithography from 1976 to 1977 and later became the Assistant Director of the Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in New York City until 1986. 

Her work can be found in the public collections of institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Washington State Arts Commission, the James E. Lewis Museum of Art in Maryland, The African American Museum of Tampa, Cynthia Sears Artist Book Collection at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, the African American Museum of Cleveland, the Driskell Center in Maryland, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.