{"id":10256,"date":"2019-02-02T14:59:42","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T19:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=10256"},"modified":"2019-02-02T15:05:37","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T20:05:37","slug":"ekua-holmes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/02\/02\/ekua-holmes\/","title":{"rendered":"With \u2018Stuff Of Stars,\u2019 Ekua Holmes Wins Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week the American Library Association announced that Boston artist Ekua Holmes had again won its Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award<\/a>, honoring African American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults. This time she was celebrated for her illustrations for her 2018 book \u201cThe Stuff of Stars,\u201d<\/a> authored by Marion Dane Bauer.<\/p>\n

The 63-year-old has been on an amazing run. She only got into children\u2019s book illustration because her art was discovered a few years back by someone from Somerville publisher Candlewick Press while on exhibit at J.P. Licks ice cream shop in Boston\u2019s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The publisher contacted her out of the blue with an invitation to work with them.<\/p>\n

Holmes\u2019s first children\u2019s book, \u201cVoice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement,\u201d written by Carole Boston Weatherford, won a Caldecott Honor in 2016, as a runner up to the Caldecott Medal, the top prize for children\u2019s picture books in the country. Her art for \u201cOut of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets,\u201d written by Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, won a 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award.<\/p>\n

These successes, Holmes says, \u201cIt\u2019s all been really shocking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then a Candlewick editor invited her to make art for \u201cThe Stuff of Stars,\u201d Bauer\u2019s story of the big bang and the birth of the earth. The book begins in a vastly empty \u201cdeep, deep dark. \u2026 And then\/the beginning\/of the beginning\/of all beginnings\/went\/BANG!\/\/And in a trillionith\/of a second\u2026\/our universe was born.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u201cThe<\/a>
\u201cThe Stuff of Stars,\u201d illustrated by Ekua Holmes and authored by Marion Dane Bauer, 2018. (Candlewick Press)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Holmes was stymied by the idea of illustrating a \u201cgiant, formless universe,\u201d she says.
\n\u201cI didn\u2019t see the connection to what I do. No people, no buildings. \u2026 I didn\u2019t see why it this was a good book for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the editor continued to urge her to take on the manuscript.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to work on it, it was torture. How do you describe something that is not yet formed?\u201d Holmes says. \u201cMy mother had this thing: When you\u2019re stuck don\u2019t try to overwhelm yourself with the future, just do the next thing.\u201d So Holmes took a break to clean her studio. Picking up things, she found a scrap of marbleized paper. \u201cAll of a sudden I was in deep space. I thought, oh, that\u2019s what I can do. \u2026 That sense of space and timelessness and the universe, it\u2019s all in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holmes says, \u201cAll of a sudden I could see a path into doing this story.\u201d<\/p>\n

So she enrolled in a class to learn how to marbleize paper. \u201cYou take water and you add a chemical that makes it sort of heavier than it usually is. Then you drip pigment on it. The pigment spreads out and it swirls.\u201d And then you dip specially-treated paper into the fluid to capture the patterns. Holmes created vivid swirls of color layered with drips and starbursts to symphonic effect.<\/p>\n

And Holmes cut out silhouettes of birds, butterflies, dinosaur bones, galloping horses, swimming dolphins, and people. She layered and collaged them by hand and digitally. Holmes says, \u201cIt is so vast and so grand. Then how do we bring that back into a single life?\u201d The book poetically surveys all of evolution leading up to this moment: \u201cYou,\/and me\/loving you.\/All of us\/the stuff of stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ekua<\/a>
Ekua Holmes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Holmes says she has another children\u2019s book in the works. She continues to run Massachusetts College of Art and Design\u2019s Sparc! artmobile, which offers roving community art workshops, as she has done since 2011. Since that year, she has also served on the Boston Art Commission, which oversees city public art projects.<\/p>\n

This coming summer she\u2019s hoping to do a second year of her \u201cRoxbury Sunflower Project.\u201d Developed with the independent Boston public art curators Now + There, she organized people to plant thousands of sun flowers across Boston\u2019s Roxbury neighborhood last summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought that this sunflower because of its special attributes would make a great symbol or emblem for Roxbury,\u201d Holmes said last June. \u201cLife is a struggle. That sunflower is so resilient that it will survive the struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Holmes is packing up her studio of 23 years at the Piano Factory in Boston\u2019s South End. Like other artists who have long rented space in the building, Holmes says, \u201cI\u2019m being pushed out in service of luxury apartments. \u2026 It\u2019s another great loss. We always say we want communities of diversity and we want artists. Well, that\u2019s what we had. But somebody wants money more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Holmes says, \u201cI insist on hope. You can have some healthy cynicism. But hope is the pillar of the world. That\u2019s an African proverb. If you remove hope, you have nothing. So I insist on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previously:<\/strong>
\nJune 12, 2018: What Happens If You Plant 10,000 Sunflowers At The Heart Of Boston\u2019s Black Community?<\/a>
\nSept. 9, 2018: Checking In On Ekua Holmes’s Blossoming ‘Roxbury Sunflowers Project’<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This week the American Library Association announced that Boston artist Ekua Holmes had again won its Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, honoring African American authors and illustrators of outstanding books for children and young adults. This time she was celebrated for her illustrations for her 2018 book \u201cThe Stuff of Stars,\u201d authored by Marion Dane […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[37,519,211,390,162,26],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10256"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10272,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10256\/revisions\/10272"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}