Artist statement as of January 23rd, 2025
My body of work is about shifting the perception of anti-black quotidian experiences from matters of unquestioned fact to debatable fabrications. I create works spanning photography, painting, film, installation, performance, and mixed media that express Black racialized experiences on individual to collective scales. My research is directed by mantric questioning of relationships– How is anti-blackness operating in a particular context? What tools of my practice do I deploy to shift perceptions of it? What relationship between material, gesture, and constructed identities can I leverage? Testing these questions clarified my visual articulation tools: the body and corporeal, technical objects of modernity (e.g data and the camera), community engagement, and collaboration. These tools are used to make my work research itself. Methodologically, I support this through daily exercises of observation and documenting these happenings via text, camera, phone and notebook (tools of data collection). Such exercises accumulate, are reviewed, analyzed and synthesized through a scope of scholarship covering the origins and impacts of racialization and oppression traversing the disciplines of visual arts, literature, social, behavioral and biomedical sciences.
Biography
Derek Anthony Holland, MPH, MFA (Born in Montgomery, AL) is an artist and researcher raised between the suburbs of Washington, DC and Philadelphia, PA. Formerly, A Black Midwest Initiative Fellow and access to Excellence Fellow at University of Illinois at Chicago. Derek has a background in public health research and earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Washington University in St. Louis where they worked on research projects with various health equity centered organizations in St. Louis, MO, Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA and recently Chicago, IL. Derek’s art work has been written about in publications including Hyperallergic and has been featured on panel discussions and podcasts creating bridges between public health and visual arts. They have collaborated in publishing several peer reviewed public health articles in the Journal of Urban Health, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Journal of Healthy Eating and Active Living. Following this Derek earned their Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from University of Illinois at Chicago and has participated in various group art exhibitions including at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO, Southside Contemporary in Richmond, VA, Blanc Gallery, Public Works Gallery, Jude Gallery, and Gallery 400 in Chicago, IL, as well as film screenings at Blanc Gallery and Soho House Chicago, and residencies in New York, USA, Berlin, DE and Cuidad de Guatemala, GT .