Regenerate Art (RA1)

In Regenerate Art (RA1), Diane Holland builds an image from images through layering paint, collage, photography, handwritten text, musical notation, and printed ephemera into a dense visual field that is simultaneously archive and painting. At the center stands Senator Dianne Feinstein, rendered in a high-contrast silhouette. She is a figure of clarity and gravity amid a swirling, fragmented world.

The series title is a deliberate inversion. Where the Nazis branded the German Expressionists Entartete Kunst, or degenerate art, Holland reclaims that lineage, declaring it regenerate: alive, necessary, resistant. The compositional chaos surrounding Feinstein is not disorder but context. It is the upheaval of her era rendered in the visual language of the movement that understood upheaval best. Kirchner's fractured figures, Grosz's satirical collisions, Hannah Höch's photomontage practice all echo here, filtered through Holland's own decades-long inquiry into how media, memory, and image-making shape culture.

Holland, who trained at Immaculate Heart College under the influence of Sister Mary Corita Kent, has long worked as an intermedia artist, one for whom no single medium is sufficient to hold what she wants to say. RA1 is her most politically explicit work to date: a portrait of public service framed as an act of cultural rescue, insisting that wise leadership and brave creativity are not separate impulses but the same one.