Essays

Robin Holder
LISA E. FARRINGTON, PH.D.

Chicago-born and New York City raised Robin Holder (b. 1952) has distinguished herself as an artist whose work seamlessly fuses leitmotifs of the personal and the universal. In large part, her innate ability to draw parallels between the microcosm of her very personal experiences and the macrocosm of shared human experiences stems from the artist's identity as a woman of myriad ethnic, sociopolitical, and spiritual influences. The offspring of an African American Christian father and a white Russian American Jewish mother, Holder was raised as a socialist and an agnostic. read more

Robin Holder: Public Artist
MICHELE COHEN, PH.D.

The expression of ethnic identity has been an American public art trope since nineteenth century immigrant groups began competing for recognition and respect by commissioning bronzes honoring their national heroes, among them German musicians, Irish poets, and Italian explorers. But it was not until the government sponsored programs of the New Deal in the 1930s that women and artists of color participated in greater numbers in shaping and reflecting American cultural identity in the public sphere. read more

In Her Own Words:
A CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST ROBIN HOLDER AND CURATOR DORIT YARON

Dorit Yaron [DY]: I first met Robin Holder on March 28, 1999. At that time, I was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and was working as a graduate assistant at The Art Gallery, the art gallery on campus. I was also in the process of searching for a subject for my master's thesis. I was very interested in focusing on a female artist whose art includes social and political content. read more