by Elizabeth Randolph

isual artist Spence Holman says, “I thought I would be dead before fifty. How did I get from thinking the future was wide open to having an expiration date?”

His series of postcards, created during a Catwalk residency in 2025, sought to answer that question via a conversation with his younger self. “Between my time at Vassar in the late 1990s and the pandemic in 2020, a lot happened,” he explains.

Looking back, he says returning to the Hudson Valley from Baltimore, where he lives, was a big draw in deciding to apply to Catwalk. He remembers his Vassar days as an “open-ended time full of possibilities,” and part of his process during his residency was to revisit and re-experience the campus.

“Vassar was great. I mean, a lot of different things happened, formative experiences, all the things one can say about college,” he recalls. “Being there really allowed me to find myself, find my tribe.” The difficulties began after college, including “a troubled relationship, and prolonged relational and medical trauma,” he says. “So that was the point of going back to campus, to connect with that positivity and that sense of self that I had at Vassar. There was a sense that I was not fully formed, but being there was helping me figure out what I wanted fully formed to look like.”

Holman visited the campus twice during his residency and says he was very intentional about how he spent his time. It was “about remembering and just being in the space, really, not overthinking it,” he reports. “Just seeing what happened, being curious about what came up and then taking that back to Catwalk.”

The seven-by-five-inch ink-and-pencil sketches he produced for the series “Wish I was there / Wish I was here” illustrate glimpses of what Holman calls “hope, healing, resilience, and rebirth.” The pieces are as deeply emotional as they are gracefully rendered. On the front of the cards, he drew trees or flowers. (One of his pieces has the famously large London plane tree on the lawn in front of the library.) On the other side, Holman placed text that often seems to illustrate two sides of the same emotion. In one example, he placed “It’s so beautiful” right above “It’s so overwhelming.” Another of his cards paired “Anything can happen” with a phrase that seems to indicate a slipping locus of control: “Things keep happening.”

“I got divorced in 2019 and the pandemic, in a way, is what saved my life,” says Holman. “It was a lot of things for a lot of people, but as difficult as it was, I can look back and say if I hadn’t been forced out of my regular life, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to face the past and figure it out.” He says the “downtime” allowed him to get back in touch with himself. “I started making work again. I started playing music again. A lot happened,” he says.

Today, he is happy to report he’s entered his Content Period. He is back where he grew up in Maryland. “I’ve got my little house. I’ve got three kids. I’ve got a garden that I love. I’ve got good people in my life. And I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

Holman returns to Catwalk for a second residency this fall.

For more information about the artist and his work, visit jspenceholman.com.