Ekua Holmes’ work is collage based and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, and the power of hope, faith and self-determination. Like Bearden quoted below, Holmes has looked out her window to find subjects for her collages. Remembering a Roxbury childhood of wonder and delight, she considers herself part of a long line of Roxbury imagemakers. In this spirit, she supports those who have a calling in the arts, creates and leads workshops, and serves as a visiting artist, lecturer and arts fellow across New England – all while keeping her own studio practice ignited. 

In Holmes’ first public art initiative, she received a Now + There Public Art Accelerator Fellowship and launched The Roxbury Sunflower Project (#RoxburySunflowerProject). Through this effort, now in its fourth year, Holmes has facilitated the planting of 10,000 sunflower seeds in her native Roxbury. A prolific book illustrator, Holmes’ work was featured in a solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from July 2021 to January 2022. As an important extension to the show, Holmes teamed with Native American artist Elizabeth James-Perry to transform the museum’s grounds into a garden of sunflowers and corn.

As an illustrator of children’s literature, Holmes has received  a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator award. In 2018 Holmes made her first foray into book illustration and won the Robert Siebert and Horn Book awards for her illustrations in Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford. In that same year, she also won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award for her Illustration of the book Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets.  In 2019 she again won the Coretta Scott King Award, this time for her illustrations in Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer.

Holmes currently serves as commissioner and vice-chair of the Boston Art Commission, which oversees the placement and maintenance of public works of art on and in City of Boston properties. She is also the associate director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she manages and coordinates sparc! the ArtMobile, an art-inspiring, art-transforming van retrofitted to contribute to community-based, multidisciplinary arts programming focusing on  Mission Hill, Roxbury and Dorchester. Holmes received her BFA in Photography from MassArt in 1977.

I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window. – American artist Romare Bearden