Harmony Holiday

Harmony Holiday: Spectacular Brooding investigates the spectacles and secrets of black grief. Considering the tension between private ritual and public display within this tradition, the Los Angeles-based artist's exhibition considers what she calls the "Black Backstage" as a zone of sacred privacy that makes the spectacularization of performance bearable. In contrast to commercial reproduction of music, dance, and film that distorts black artistry, Harmony positions the home and the studio as intimate spaces of black creative life.

The exhibition divides the gallery into two spaces: the dance studio and the cutting room. In the studio, Holiday rehearses live and records her preparatory process towards the performance of a solo dance, which marks a return to live dance performance for the first time in decades. Holiday's choreography considers iconic expressions of black grieving in choreography by Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Bill T. Jones, Katherine Dunham, and Robert Battle, as well as gestures of black performance and everyday life in digital culture. A mourner's bench provides a place of solitude and public memorial, inviting people to listen to oral histories and to engage with Holiday's own writing. In the cutting room, Holiday screens an excerpt of a new film that considers these themes through a documentary of a living artist.

Harmony Holiday is a writer and interdisciplinary artist working across dance, film, music and archives of black culture. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever (2022) and Maafa (2025). She curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at the Los Angeles music and archive venue 2220arts. Holiday is a staff writer for LA Times Image and 4Columns and has had featured writing in The New Yorker, Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Drift, among others. Her first solo exhibition, Black Backstage, exploring the aspects of black performance culture that cannot be spectacularized through film and sound sculpture, was presented at The Kitchen in New York in 2024. Holiday won a 2025 Creative Capital Award and has received fellowships from The Poetry Foundation, Silver's Foundation, The Rabkin Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among other awards for her writing. Holiday is currently working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln for Yale University Press, a book of memoir and music criticism, and her next collection of poems, among other writing, film, and curatorial projects.