Artwork copyright Robin Holder. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Meeting the Ancestral Drum, 1994

Robin Holder
(American, born 1952)

Location: Mount Baker Junior/Senior High School, Deming

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Artist Robin Holder created Meeting the Ancestral Drum to show the importance of stories to our formation of identity and our connection to family and history. This piece was inspired by a close friend, who as a girl would massage her elderly grandmother's feet while her grandmother told wonderful stories about her life.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Mount Baker School District.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

New Jersey-based artist Robin Holder creates prints, paintings, and site-specific artworks. Her art expresses her experiences as a woman and her multicultural heritage. In her own words, "My work is motivated by my multi-cultural background in which layers upon layers of various racial, economic, cultural and spiritual worlds exist within one family... I am developing a visual language of archetypal symbols from Africa, Native North and South America, and Pharaonic Egypt. I use the spears, shields, vessels, masks, magical wands, birds, pyramids, and temples as symbols of rituals and tools used in the battle for wisdom, strength, tolerance, balance and spiritual growth."

About Holder's process: "I use combinations of photo­silkscreen, color viscosity collagraph, plexiglass, and linoleum. The images are created by cutting out stencils which form the shapes of the Warrior Women, animals, leaves, etc. The stencils are surface-rolled with inks and placed on sheets of inked or painted plexiglass. The plates are then printed on paper using a press... The approach I use is like a collage and my ideas continue to reveal themselves from print to print, like a story, because my stencil shapes are a language that I'm constantly expanding."