Artist Talk: Holly Bass, We Hold These Truths...
Presented in partnership with the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series and the Roman J. Witt Residency Program.
Speaker
Holly BassDate & time
Location
Since 1776 Americans have used major anniversaries of the nation's founding to celebrate, debate, revise, and perform the story of the United States. For her new exhibition opening October 3, 2026 at UMMA, We Hold These Truths…, artist and, Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence Holly Bass looks to three of those anniversary years (1876, 1976, 2026) to explore how national ideals are staged in public, preserved in private, and passed down through generations.
In this talk, Bass will discuss the ideas behind We Hold These Truths..., her process of transforming UMMA's iconic Apse into an environment, and the role art plays in helping communities consider these varied histories. Drawing from her practice across performance, visual art, theater, writing, and engagement, Bass will offer a preview of the exhibition and how this new body of work is inspired by historic home museums.
Bass sees the exhibition as an invitation to consider whose experiences and perspectives inform public decision-making.
"Art can't solve social problems. But art can help us look at our challenges differently and imagine new solutions. It can also help us understand our past. One of the works on view in the exhibition, The Century Table, is created from piecing together dining tables representing different eras of American design. Visitors are encouraged to sit down and consider who has a seat at the proverbial table and who does not, and how that has changed over time. Good public policy is, in many ways, about bringing more voices to the table," Bass said.
Bass is the 2026 Roman J. Witt Artist In Residence and an award-winning artist and cultural worker based in Washington, DC. Her work—held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery—frequently engages communities through workshops, devised theater, and participatory installations and explores themes of American history, generational labor and liberation.
Bass has been recognized with awards for multiple art forms. She received a 2024 Washington Award for art and social justice. She is a 2022 MAP Fund recipient for theater, a 2020 Live Feed Resident Artist at New York Live Arts for choreography and dance and a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. She performed at the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of Loophole of Retreat, Simone Leigh's special project for the U.S. Pavilion. She regularly contributes book reviews to the New York Times and was the first journalist to put the term "hip hop theater" into print in a 1999 article for American Theatre magazine. Bass directed an arts program for adjudicated teens in DC's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services from 2014-2019 and she was the National Director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program to increase arts access in under-resourced elementary and middle schools, from 2019-2025. She studied modern dance under Viola Farber and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning her Master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In fall 2026, Bass will join the U-M Ford School of Public Policy as the Towsley Policymaker in Residence.
We Hold These Truths… opens at UMMA on October 3, 2026.
This event is free and open to the public. No registration or ticket is required.
