Independent Supports Guggenheim Acquisition of Major Work by Deborah-Joyce Holman

Independent is pleased to announce that it has raised matching funds for the acquisition of a major work by Deborah-Joyce Holman by the Guggenheim Museum, as part of its 2024 initiative to add new works to the collection. This milestone reflects Independent’’s mission to support artists of critical and curatorial excellence beyond their presentations at the New York fair.  

Holman’s work, entitled Moment 2, was produced with the support of the Luma Foundation. The nine-hour film stars the artist Rebecca Bellantoni reciting excerpts from Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary interview with the gay Black performer and sex worker Jason Holliday. Holman’s reinterpretation offers a meditation on the politics of portraiture, complicating the dynamic, temporality, gender and race relations present in the original version. The work was presented at the 15th anniversary edition of Independent in May of 2024, by the London gallery Ginny on Frederick, marking the artist’s solo debut in New York.

Recognizing the work’s importance, the Guggenheim’s Photography Council collaborated with Independent founder Elizabeth Dee to secure support for the work to enter the museum’s collection. The Guggenheim is the first American museum to acquire the work. 

Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Basel, Switzerland. From 2020 to 2022, they worked at East London arts organisation Auto Italia as associate director, and they were the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, which ran from 2015 to 2020. 

Holman is having their first institutional show in the US at the Swiss Institute, on view through April 13, 2025. The exhibition focuses on the single-channel 16 mm film Close-Up, 2024, which features a Black actress in a modernist domestic setting, quietly engaged in mundane tasks like drinking tea and lying on a couch. The camera shifts between the actress’s expressionless face, captured in an extreme close-up, and the details and architecture of her surroundings, oscillating between portrait and anti-portrait. By juxtaposing the intimacy of the framing and the lack of emotion in the actress’s gestures, Close-Up challenges viewers’ presumptions about the access they have to the interior thoughts and feelings of marginalized subjects on screen.  

Independent has a long standing track record of curating New York debuts by prominent and consequential artists. The organization's mission is to contextualize, validate, and forecast future-facing topics in art for established collectors and collecting institutions.