Under the precise and painstakingly positioned Fraxion 3 and Monopoint lights, camouflage patterns emerge from the shiny coat of a horse depicted on a monumental 10-foot wide, 7.5-foot tall canvas. The painterly camuflage on Jammie Holmes’ striking acrylic on canvas Back Horse (2023) is apropos, as we learn from the artist’s inspiration for the symbolic equine subject.
With the custom lighting, the coat’s disguising effect transforms the painting and forces our gaze deeper into the seemingly simple realistic subject. “Most of my work is Black males and females. Around the time of that painting I worked on a Vietnam series about Black soldiers having to fight in America for equal rights and in Vietnam for America.
That horse came around the same time so I replaced the human figure with the endurance of the horse. So the horse is a human,” Holmes explained. Some 300,000 Black Americans served in the Vietnam War, according to the Library of Congress.
In 1965, mid-way through the conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Black Americans filled 31% of the ground combat battalions in Vietnam, nearly triple the percentage of Black Americans as a minority in the general U.S. population at the time (12%).
Black Americans accounted for a staggering and grossly disproportionate 24% of the U.S. Army's fatal casualties in 1965.
Through this portrait, we confront the dark history of Black people in the U.S., along with the history of horses in warfare, which dates back to at least.