Top: Holloway at an opening reception Monday night. Bottom, from left to right: 2024 monotypes The Space Between, Rebel Yes, Abstract Rebel, Rebel Indeed, The Unmentioned, and Can We Talk About It. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The six monotypes feel like spring, even though the season is still months away. On one, the imprint of paan leaves resembles three rounded hearts, the shapes deep-veined and floating in a sea of cobalt blue. On another, a feather dances atop summer foliage, all soaked in the light green of rebirth. Below, elements of a face emerge amidst fragments of the natural world, this collision of man and that which he has tried to control.
The sextet is part of Shaunda Holloway: Abstract Rebel, a one-woman show now open at the Mitchell Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. Curated by the bldg fund principal nico w. okoro, the exhibition celebrates Holloway’s deep connection to nature and the environment, making space for the jazz-flecked sensibility, poetry, Black history, and human-to-human connection that defines her oeuvre.
The show also marks a happy homecoming: Holloway’s work was on view last year during Westville’s annual Artwalk, and is now kicking off Black History Month. The library has also become a special place for okoro and her family, who come at least once a week for kids’ programming. Monday, both looked at home among the works, which turn the room into a kind of cultural sanctuary.
Top: Holloway presents a certificate of recognition to her cousin, Okari Maculey. “You are the essence of family, and you teach me how to be,” she said. Bottom: A viewer with Hollloway’s pieces Genesis and Proven.
“I decided that I wanted to have a show that expressed the things that are important to me,” Holloway said at an opening on Monday night, pausing to greet friends and fellow artists as they came into the space. “I’ve come to the conclusion that choosing to be happy is an act of rebellion … and I’m having a good time. When I create a piece, it’s about not just the material, but the spirit of it. It’s an offering back to the work.”
That starts with the practice itself, which Holloway has deepened and played with for years. In a monotype, an artist inks a plate, works out whatever designs or interventions they want (for instance, pressing a leaf into the ink to create an imprint, or rolling on multiple layers of color), places paper on the plate, and then runs it through a press.
Unlike intaglio or relief printing techniques, where carved plates can be re-inked, a monotype is one of a kind, producing only one image (sometimes the artist will make a second “ghost print,” with the ink that remains). That’s one of the things that makes it so special—there aren’t multiple editions of the work by design—making it the place where painting collides with printmaking.
Holloway’s own generous, thoughtful approach to process defines the exhibition, an installation of work—mostly monotype, but also painting and some collage—that fills but never overwhelms the space. Near the entrance to the room, the artist’s 2016 Look Forward greets viewers with a welcome, layered burst of color, its surface a wash of tangerine and sandstone. Atop that color, there’s a rounded strip of black and white, a trio of orange flowers, a handful of undulating squiggles.
Top: Year of Concern, a 2025 monotype on cork. Bottom: Curator Johnes Ruta with Proven.
It feels essential, poetic: shapes swirl around, cut through, and bloom from the surface of the paper, inviting a viewer to come closer. When they inevitably do, the nuance of her work reveals itself: the interplay of color, texture and whisper-thin smears of ink, the collage-like elements that dance around each other musically, the sense of stillness and movement across the paper.
So too in Holloway’s 2024 Proven, which explodes with swaths of deep, brighter-than-sunshine yellow, thick rows of sapphire and textured elements like netting, feathers, and black-and-white concentric circles. Between this dance of form and color, a profile emerges, floating vibrantly in space. Like a 2024 portrait of James Baldwin also in the show, it is one of Holloway’s new experiments on cork, part of her interest in substrate and reuse.
“In her layered collages, paintings, photographs, and prints, Holloway creates depth—both literally and figuratively—that honors the expansiveness of the African diaspora,” writes okoro in an accompanying checklist, and the words come alive around the room. “Her works contain a narrative quality, with stories that unfold the longer and harder a viewer engages the work, lending their own unique interpretation.”
Indeed, the works are so full of life that they all but breathe from the walls. A viewer can feel it in What Is The Solution, as a long, mask-like face looks out into the room, its black and white on a layered, sumptuous background of blue. Or Soul and City, where human forms, layers of blue and red and a leaning building lend the work a sense of movement. Or her layered 2024 portrait of Baldwin in his centenary year, his look so intense it could bore a hole right through the viewer.
Top: Curator nico w. okoro speaks at an opening (the pieces behind her, from left to right, are People In Nature, Soul and City, and What Is The Solution. Bottom: Sea and Air and All That.
It’s palpable too, that joy and toil of living, in Holloway’s 2025 Year of Concern. In the work, a figure stands beneath a canopy of green and yellow dots, arms wrapped around two additional figures who sit beneath her. Their faces are mask-like, exhausted, tired eyes accented with a neon yellow. Above them, the figure is haloed, beatific, as though she is trying to hold everything together in this moment.
The work has layers of meaning: the pain in the figures’ expressions, the peace of the embrace, the essence and act of living as the world continues to exist around them. An orange oval, the imprint of a leaf, flowers over her left shoulder. Something, in the midst of this interminably long month, is still in bloom.
If Abstract Rebel is solidly of the present, the spirit of the show also goes back to Holloway’s own childhood in the West Rock Housing Projects, where blight and nature lived side by side. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, Holloway received constant environmental messaging, from de-littering campaigns to Smokey Bear’s reminder not to start fires. Then she would step outside, and see trash that the neighbors—and the city—couldn’t be bothered to clean up.
“It was very disturbing to me,” she said. As she navigated life as a young artist, she watched the natural world in awe, documenting caterpillars as they morphed into butterflies, trees as they grew thick green foliage and then shed their leaves, snow that fell and crusted with ice each year. It instilled in her a sense of kinship with the world around her. To this day, it infuriates her when she sees a driver roll down a window, and discard a piece of litter on the road, as if the planet is their private trash can.
“I want to have people recognize the connection between themselves and nature,” she said.
She has, of course, succeeded in spades. The monotypes in Abstract Rebel are as conceptually interesting as they are technically advanced, with a creator who wants to push her viewers to look closely (they would be wise to do so). It feels deliciously close in pieces like Genesis, where she has used fall leaves and multiple inkings to achieve a polleny, brilliant yellow fall color that is cut with the black and brown of tree bark, of soil, of things falling into decay. It’s the circle of life, in real time.
In new prints like People and Nature (one of her first experiments in monotype on canvas), she does it again, with a rich layering of color that feels new and heart-singingly bright. The piece, completed at Creative Arts Workshop, is a joyful riot of color, in which faces emerge among and sometimes inside fall leaves that dot the canvas. With over a half a dozen colors and three times as many shapes, it warrants a second, and third, and tenth close look, bursting with more meaning every time a viewer turns back to it.
At an opening Monday night, Holloway led with gratitude, taking a moment to recognize the people and places that have gotten her to this point in her career. In front of her, an audience included friends, family, colleagues from the New Haven Public Library to Kulturally LIT Fest and Creative Arts Workshop. Before reading original poems, she recalled one icy night several winters ago, when a stranger helped her scramble onto the sidewalk without slipping. That’s the sense of thanks she often feels when she presents her work.
Your efforts showed up like centuries, and I’m thankful for the hands that come together to support me, she read from the poem “Your Hands.” Fingers guide me / urge me to be patient / pull me together when parts of my soul are not adjacent.
When doubt has my mind under siege / and I feel that what I must say / what I must have / is out of reach, she continued. You show me / You teach me / And I thank you.
“There are no words to express my gratitude,” she later added. “Gratitude is something that my mom was really into. And then when I was younger, I was really kind of rebellious—like why have it? But life will teach you to be grateful. And I’m grateful that I have a point of reference.”
Abstract Rebel runs at the Mitchell Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, 37 Harrison St. in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, through the month of February.