Derek Anthony Holland works from the everyday. Every day, they document — reading in bed, witnessing mental health crises on a commute, moving through the ordinary labor of existence. The tools are a camera phone, a pen, a notebook: instruments of data collection repurposed as artistic method. What is gathered is then reviewed, analyzed, synthesized, and made into work.

That work takes the form of photography, painting, film, installation, performance, and mixed media. It is driven by a set of recurring questions that function as mantras: Who are you to yourself and to others? How are constructed identities — gender, race, physical and intellectual dis/ability — operating in this context? What relationship between materials and gestures can be leveraged? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the engine of the practice.

Holland moves through scholarship the way a researcher moves through a literature review — drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Jack Whitten, and Mary Lovelace O'Neal among others, traversing visual arts, literature, and the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Their works are often literally or figuratively annotated with the names and thinking of past and present makers. The annotation is not decorative. It is an act of acknowledgment — and of challenge. A refusal to pretend that any way of being identified exists outside of history.