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.
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 in October 2026 at UMMA, We Hold These Truths…, artist 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 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 also be a Towsley Policymaker in Residence at the U-M Ford School of Public Policy.
We Hold These Truths… opens at UMMA on October 3, 2026.
About the University of Michigan Roman J. Witt Residency
The Roman J. Witt Residency Program, developed with the support of University of Michigan alumna Penny W. Stamps and named in honor of her father, is an annual international competition that awards one residency per academic year to a visiting artist/designer who proposes to develop a new work in collaboration with University of Michigan students and faculty.
Learn MoreSUPPORT
Holly Bass: We Hold These Truths… is presented in partnership with the Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence Program of the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, with lead support provided by the Benedek Endowment Fund for the Humanities, the Richard and Rosann Noel Endowment, the Greg Hodes and Heidi Hertel Hodes Partners in the Arts Endowment Fund, the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment Fund, U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
The exhibition as well as tonight’s program are presented in partnership with the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, the Roman J. Witt Residency Program, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.