Fresh Talk: Holly Bass

Join artist Holly Bass and Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator at the National Gallery of Art, for a Fresh Talk exploring migration, movement, and identity through the lens of Bass’s multidisciplinary practice. Inspired by Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, the conversation will consider how personal histories of movement and return shape ideas of home, belonging, and what it means to be American.

Drawing on Bass’s work in performance, visual art, poetry, and installation, the conversation will explore how artists use personal and community histories to explore questions of place and cultural identity. Bass’s own experiences growing up as a military child, moving between military bases, and later returning to the South after years on the West Coast have informed her artistic practice.

Stop by earlier between 12 and 4 pm during our free Community Day in the Great Hall to participate in Bass’s special drop-in Cultural Preserves activation.

A salon-style cocktail reception will follow the discussion.

Fresh Talk: Holly Bass: Tickets Required
General admission: $25 / Students, seniors, DC residents: $22 / Members: $20 

About the artist
Holly Bass is a multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer and writer whose work explores themes of American history, generational labor and liberation across dance, theater, poetry, photography, installation, video and performance. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Bass is the 2025-2026 Roman J. Witt Visiting Artist at the University of Michigan, a joint program of the Stamps School of Art and Design and University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). She performed at the 2022 Venice Biennale as part of Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat for the U.S. Pavilion. She previously served as National Director for Turnaround Arts at the Kennedy Center, a program to increase arts access in under-resourced elementary and middle schools, and directed an arts program for adjudicated teens in DC’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. She has been recognized with awards for multiple art forms, including recognition as a 2022 MAP Fund recipient for theater, a 2020 Live Feed Resident Artist at New York Live Arts for choreography and dance, a 2021–22 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and a 2024 Washington Award for art and social justice. 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 addition to her artist practice, Bass contributes book reviews to the New York Times and in 1999 was the first journalist to use the term “hip hop theater” in print.