DIVERSEartLA 2019

“Memorable Mud” is a participative installation that draws viewers into a multi-sensorial experience featuring scents, music – exclusively composed for this art work – and a carefully designed system reflecting light through translucent stones. The piece is the end result of an exploratory process that generates two experiences for attendees. The first experience begins as the viewer enters the room and comes across giant clay structures, clay domes with pinnacles and other elements, which hang from the ceiling from a height of 1.4 meters. This landscape acts as a bubble of clay, which is retrieved from the production place. The domes have their own inner world – one which can be accessed by the public through holes located in the lower part. This all acts as a place where the artist’s life and personal memories are stored and materialize in clay.

Andrés Paredes’s work ranges from drawings and two-dimensional cutting paper to immersive installations, and make up private collections in Argentina and in several countries abroad. He lives and works in both Misiones and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

For Bob Holmes who calls himself “a citizen of the world,” his art collection is a reflection of his life and times. The history of both colonial oppression by Europeans in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, and the history of slavery in the United States have created a warped perception of Black people as they have moved, or been forced to move, throughout the world. That perception has often created a narrow impression of Black people’s and other peoples of colors’ interests, limitations, possibilities and futures.

Holmes says, “As one steps out of the manner in which he is perceived, challenges widely held perceptions about the Black body, travels throughout the world and accumulates broad interests, that accumulated knowledge and experience can lift one out of seeing and being seen in a purely racial context, while at the same time, standing firmly upon the foundation of one’s ethnic culture.” In Holmes’ particular case, those tenets have enriched his life beyond the prescribed boundaries of narrow perceptions and identity, and have led to a broad collection of art that reflects his appreciation and love of rich cultural identities of so-called ethnic categories.

In his wide collection we can find a diverse offering of cultures through artists such as Dan McCleary, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Derrick Maddox, Charles White, Romare Bearden, Gronk, Deni Ponty, Betty Parsons, Elizabeth Catlett, David Alfaro Siquieros and Aime Mpane, among many others.