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Southern Grown 

Lives & works in Denver, Colorado 

BFA, MFA

 

Jazz Holmes creates mixed media paintings that bring representation to the historic tapestry of cultural foodways within Black American society. Through bright color, layered surfaces, gilded embellishment, and shining ornamentation, Holmes treats food as both archive and inheritance: a living record of agricultural labor, ancestral knowledge, and cultural survival. Her work reflects the essential relationship between people and the land, honoring the hands that cultivated, harvested, cooked, preserved, and transformed nourishment into tradition. Holmes situates Black foodways within a larger journey from Africa to America, from forced displacement to cultural transformation, and from historical rupture to acts of remembrance.

 

Holmes’s practice insists on a fuller narrative of Black American history, one that acknowledges the violence and disgrace of chattel slavery while refusing to let oppression become the only frame. Her use of abundant color elevates the persistent creativity of Black people through marginalization, celebrating the beauty, resilience, and ingenuity embedded in Black agricultural and culinary traditions. By transforming references to crops, dishes, vessels, culture, and domestic forms into layered meditations on heritage and identity, Holmes highlights the importance of preserving connections to ancestry and restores honor to traditions that have long nourished American culture.