James Fuentes is thrilled to announce Geoffrey Holder, Saturday Night, on view November 12 through December 20 in New York. Spanning the early-1980s onward, the exhibition spotlights Holder’s recurring series of nightlife paintings, which pay homage to the artist’s youngest memories of Trinidadian dancehalls. These spaces of music, movement, and collective joy sparked Holder’s earliest imagination and remained foundational threads in his later work. Saturday Night traces this enduring influence and highlights Holder’s own lasting impact on New York’s dance and cultural landscape.
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1930, Holder declared himself an artist at the age of seven. The dancehall was the site of his parents’ first meeting, and became a creative ritual he regularly observed as a child and would later take part in. Well before he took the helm of his brother’s dance troupe at the age of 20, these social gatherings provided a sensory study of rhythm, relation, and style. Financed by a sale of his paintings, Holder relocated to New York City in 1953, a move that set the stage for one of the most dynamic multidisciplinary careers of the twentieth century. While celebrated as a performer, choreographer, director, and designer, painting remained his most constant and personal practice.
In the dancehall works, figures emerge through low light and color with a quiet intensity, rendered with the same refined physical awareness that defined Holder’s choreographic approach. While his portraits often stage individual, isolated figures—with context rendered only through the attitude and elegance of their bearing—the dancehall paintings situate these energies within a social field. That moment of intimate attention becomes collective as figures gather in motion within a charged environment, revealing Holder’s deep sensitivity to not only the body but its movement as a shared language.
Though rooted in memory, these paintings also affirm the artist’s sustained dialogue with New York’s creative milieu. Holder’s impact on the city’s cultural landscape extended beyond the canvas: he designed costumes and choreography for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, recently revisited in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2024). His downtown loft, shared with his wife and muse Carmen de Lavallade, Holder fostered a salon that bridged disciplines and generations. Performers, painters, and musicians—including Alice Neel, Francis Bacon, and Lena Horne—moved through this space of exchange, reflecting a shared belief in art as lived experience. Saturday Night seeks to bring a new perspective to Holder’s place within this transhistorical conversation on figuration, embodiment, and the fullness of life.
