SD Holman Lens-based Artist | sdholman.com
https://shootinggallery59.pixieset.com/
“My pronoun is art.”
This isn’t metaphor—it is an invocation. Holman’s identity refuses linguistic containment: not he, not she, not they—but art itself, capacious enough to hold transformation, loss, play, erotic charge, and world-making.
For over six decades, SD Holman has moved between and witnessed cultural terrains across Canada, the U.S., and Germany. Born in Hollywood, have been foundational in queer and environmental arts communities. In 2025, King Charles III awarded them the Coronation Medal for significant contributions in arts, culture, and human rights advocacy. Described by curator and scholar Jonathan D. Katz as “visionary,” Holman occupies the edge of visibility, embracing the conceptually rich terrain of the Interbeing, and continues to advocate for artistic dissent in an age defined by ecological collapse and social precarity. Their work is a call to presence in a world precariously losing its capacity to attend.
Holman’s art unfolds in the spaces between: between photograph and ritual, visibility and elision, grief and emergence. They adopt the role of participant observer—a position that Judith Butler theorizes in social participation within the matrix of intelligibility, where gender, identity, and culture are continually produced through relational visibility. Holman enters this matrix to disturb it, to uncover the unseen, to dignify those cultural subjects forced into erasure.
SD Holman’s work champions the Symbiocene, a term as a counterpoint to the Anthropocene, which is the current geological epoch characterized by human impact on the planet. Coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2011, the Symbiocene envisions a future where humanity re-integrates with natural systems, fostering mutualistic relationships rather than exploitation. SD Holman’s artwork reaches across performance and installations, and curls into itself a multitude of indecisive moments.
Holman is a graduate of ECUAD, laureate of the YWCA Women of Distinction Award, and Founding Artistic Director Emeritus of the transdisciplinary QAF+SUM gallery.
Holman’s work is collected privately and exhibits internationally, including Wellesley College, Amherst College, CLGA ArQuives (Toronto), the Advocate Gallery (Los Angeles), the Soady-Campbell Gallery (New York), the San Francisco Public Library, On Main Gallery, The Helen Pitt International Gallery, Charles H. Scott, Exposure, Gallery Gachet, SUM gallery, the Roundhouse, Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Artropolis and Fotobase Galleries (Vancouver). Holman’s portrait project BUTCH: Not like the other girls toured North America and is in its second print edition, published by Caitlin Press. Seven written and produced art books: found here. Art published in printed books: Culture and Education, Wadham, Pudsey & Boyd, (Pearson Education Australia: 2007; 2nd ed. 2009); Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go, Gibson & Meem (Routledge: 2002); Fusion (Link publications: 2002); The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography, Jakubowski & Jaye Lewis (Robinson Publishing: 2001). Studio Q, Holman’s notorious DTES Art Salon in Vancouver’s Chinatown, was featured in Secrets of the City (1st edition).
Upcoming: Exhibitions include:
– Music for Turtles: Vancouver East Cultural Center (the Cultch), Sept. 23 & 24 2025
– Pas à pas; Not intent on Arriving: Comox Valley Art Gallery, Curator Denise Lawson, March 28- May 30 2026
– Butch: Berlin, Galerie Hirschheydt, curator Nicholé Valásquez, Sept. 2026
Holman’s earliest work emerged in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown—sites of cultural survival, grit, and radical community. Straight out of Emily Carr University, they joined the Vancouver Association for Non-commercial Culture (the NON), positioning themselves early in the artist-led salon and activist milieu.
By 2008, Holman directed Pride in Art and spearheaded the founding of Queer Arts Festival (QAF)—now ranked among the world’s top queer arts festivals—and founded SUM Gallery, Canada’s sole 2SLGBTQ+ mandated art space. Their DTES salon, Studio Q, became notorious for mixing art, politics, erotics, performance, and care—all in one communal salon environment where art wasn’t shown, it was enacted.
Curatorial Highlights
As a curator, Holman engineers thresholds where witnessing becomes ethical imperative.
- UnSettled (2017): the world’s first Two-Spirit curated arts festival, expanding Indigenous queer agency beyond token visibility.
- TRIGGER: the 25-year commemoration of Kiss & Tell’s Drawing the Line, reactivating feminist erotic reclamation on new terms.
- Adrian Stimson: Naked Napi: his first solo exhibition after winning the Governor General’s Award—imbued with cultural specificity and poetic force.
- Drama Queer: curated by art historian Jonathan D. Katz in his only Canadian institutional exhibition to date—a site of queerness as intellectual praxis.
- Holman is Vice-President of the On The Cutting Edge Society; On Main Gallery.
Holman doesn’t merely select artists—they hosted constellation-making events that amplified the unheard and reshaped the cultural sensory field.
Curatorial fun facts + …
SD Holman (Canada/USA/Berlin) is a critically acclaimed racialized dyslexic Jewish pagan artist practicing lens-based art, installation, performance, curation, and other provocations.
Holman played the first recurring lesbian role on North American network television, years before Ellen Degeneres’ televised coming out, as Beth on Global TV’s Madison for three seasons; ( a role which led to Madison being denied syndication in the U.S.). SD Holman lived and worked as a cowboy in Rock Creek B.C. for several years.
SD Holman’s pronoun is art.