Artist statement as of July 3rd, 2025
My work focuses on gathering and manipulating quotidian experiences to criticise and process identity through ontological and epistemological approaches. Everyday I document experiences ranging from reading in bed to witnessing and evading mental health crises of pedestrians on my commute via writing, photographing, annotating, analyzing and, drawing. Materially, I create works using photography, painting, film, installation, performance, and mixed media that express those experiences for collective scales through synthesis, representation and abstraction. The deployment and manipulation of said experiences is directed by mantric questioning of relationships– Who are you to yourself and to others? How are constructed identities: gender, race, physical and intellectual dis/ability operating in this context? What relationship between materials and gestures can I leverage? Pragmatically, The labor of my everyday existence is captured through technical objects of modernity via camera phone, pen and notebook (tools of data collection). My personal experiences 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 influenced by cultural workers including and not limited to W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hourston, Toni Morrison, Jack Whitten and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. My works are often literally or figuratively annotated with past and present makers and thinkers to both challenge and acknowledge modern ways of being identified.
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 Ciudad de Guatemala, GT .