Q&A with Sharon Holland: Outsider art, the Faculty Fellowship, community work, and more
March 14, 2025 | Ruby Wang
Sharon Holland is a distinguished professor of American studies. She is the author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2000); co-author of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (DUP, 2006) with Tiya Miles; The Erotic Life of Racism (DUP, 2012), and most recently an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (DUP, 2023). Holland serves on the board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective.
Through the CES Collective, Holland has worked with the Institute as part of programming for the 2022 Reckford Lecture. This spring, she joined the Faculty Fellowship Program as a Hyde Fellow to work on the project “Queer Eyes: Readings of ‘Outsider’ Art.” In this Q&A, Holland shares more about her project along with detailing her community-based work, food writing, and more.
Q: Your work is highly interdisciplinary, pursuing questions in the fields of critical race/ethnic, Black, feminist, queer studies, and more. How has your experience been in engaging with other scholars from differing disciplines in the Faculty Fellowship so far?
A: Our discussions in the IAH roundtable of Fellows have been so generative. I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to our conversations. I was the first to go and the feedback I got from colleagues was invaluable. Having interdisciplinary eyes on a project sharpens your argument and gives you a real sense of who your audience might be. In addition, there is no underestimating, no matter what your rank, the impact of kudos from colleagues speckled through the feedback you receive. If you have a novel idea and you want to put it out there, but it might challenge folks in ways that they find uncomfortable or paradigm-shifting, it’s wonderful to have a scholar you respect point out the thorny parts and give you a thumbs-up for the way you approach that work.
Q: We’d love to learn more about your current project. What is outsider art, and how is queerness represented in it? How does your project tackle these questions?
A: I think that the very term “outsider” is contested in the field of art history. For the most part, the category pertains to those artists who have not had formal training in the cultural production of art. Many of these artists have since become more inside than “outside” and are included in collections from the Getty to MOMA.
My work is less about the category or debates within art history (I am not an art historian by any stretch), and more about the sexualities represented across several artists, some whose work is held by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (Atlanta) and others whose work is held in smaller museum collections such as J. Alan Cumbey in Richmond, VA or still others whose works are not held in gallery or museum spaces (as with transgender musician/performance artist and painter, Greta Boney).
Q: Your scholarship does not focus on art history — how did you become interested in outsider art?
A: I have been involved with artists and galleries since I was in the Bay Area in the ’90s and fell in love with the photography of Jean Weisinger (Oakland, CA.). Her iconic photo of Audre Lorde and South African activist and organizer, Ellen Kuzwayo, was one of the first pieces of art I purchased as a young scholar. From then on, I went to openings, learned a lot about emerging artists and their work and tried to support them wherever I landed, even in Madrid in 2008.
My love of a medium of communication that I didn’t have the remotest hope of participating in – I cannot draw to save my life – moved me to not only establish a small and growing collection, but to try to have a personal relationship with many of the artists whose work I admire. When I was hired in American studies here, I knew that the late Bernie Herman was also passionate about art. He introduced me to “outsider” art, and it challenged the kind of vision I had for my own collection and my relationship to it. From there, I wrote my first essay (published in 2016) on the great visual artist Ronald Lockett, who died of AIDS in 1998. He was part of the Bessemer, Alabama group of artists, sculptors, and quilters – a hotspot in this nation for Black genius for sure. Once I started writing about and thinking through the creative passion of Ronald Lockett, Lonnie Holley, Purvis Young, Georgia and Henry Speller, and Samuel Doyle, among others, I was hooked.
Q: How do you support interdisciplinary research in your department and your teaching? Could you share details about your involvement with the Critical Ethnic Studies Collective?
A: I am always an advocate of interdisciplinary work in my classroom. I find it helps students to think capaciously about solving problems; it gives them varying methodologies and tools for critical thinking, which is always already uncomfortable. I try to remind students that the most successful students venture from their comfort zone to experience new communities and schools of thought while in college – that is the central purpose of what it means to be educated, in the broadest sense.
CES was started by a group of faculty members who were working on social justice initiatives on campus, especially those that foregrounded efforts to desegregate. I am choosing to use the word “desegregate” instead of “DEI,” not because of pressure to distance ourselves from DEI, but to make a point about what it was here for in the first place. Just as Black History Month was not born out of DEI programs – those are relatively new to college campuses – efforts to desegregate university campuses began long ago and continue to be fraught. I often remind my students that I was born in a segregated hospital, that “The Civil Rights Act” is as old as I am.
This journey to create a professoriate and a student body that reflects the diverse constituents of our state, and this nation is far from over. Cancelling DEI programs, and the language that support them will not erase the presence of difference, and the necessity for change in our founding ideologies – it will only produce a group of new scholars with renewed commitment to the ideals we hold for a truly liberated society. We established CES because we wanted to come together to have conversations about our work outside traditional departmental structures. We also wanted an avenue to support graduate students working in the field and to create opportunities for them to work together in a cohort through our graduate fellows program.
Q: You are also heavily involved with community advocacy. Could you share more about QTIPOC Forever Home?
A: The QTIPOC Survival Fund operated for three years, serving the queer, transgender Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and rural North Carolina. We were an intergenerational and BIPOC-led mutual aid fund. Our organizers – Tiz Giordano and Omni Perry – were all volunteers, so 100% of our donations went to our recipients. The initiative was unique in that it was low-barrier mutual aid. As mutual aid scholar, activist, and lawyer Dean Spade reminds us, our work is about “solidarity NOT charity.” It is us keeping us safe.
The work recognizes a core principle of community-minded work that understands that marginalized people know best when it comes to funding their own survival. Another core principle is that wealth redistribution and low-barrier funds put needed resources in the hands of vulnerable community members while shoring up their efforts to self-determination. The fund distributed over $200,000 to recipients during the three years it was in operation. We have since established a not-for-profit, QTIPOC Forever Home, a land-based community project that is in the planning stages. Part of that project has been launched: “The Cauldron,” our food justice community program, bringing nutritionally dense meals to community members who need them. We are in the fundraising stage and hope to be up and running in a few years.
Q: Do you find that community-based work informs your research? Or does research support your community-based work?
A: I think that the relationship is absolutely reciprocal. I love the organizers I know, work with, and consider family in the greater Triangle. My intergenerational work with them is key to the vitality of the research I do. If it wasn’t for the QTIPOC fund, I wouldn’t have established a connection with artist Greta Boney. Being in community enriches and expands my research!
Q: Anything else you’d like to share?
A: I am also a creative non-fiction writer, and you can see my work on my very slow-foodie writerly blog, The Professor’s Table. I am in the process of working on a manuscript entitled, “Those Who Eat” about my life at the table. I have also been the guest host of the podcast, Dog Save the People, and I am working on a book about my life with dogs.
Sharon Holland was interviewed by Ruby Wang for this Q&A.
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