Cake (2024) brings together two of Holmes’s most resonant motifs: the flower and the flag. The flower, adorned with large, watchful eyes, is Holmes’s invented character “Goldie” a recurring presence in his recent works that fuses beauty with surveillance, vulnerability with vigilance. The eyes are more than symbolic; they are Holmes’s insistence that Black life not only be remembered, but seen fully, presently, and on its own terms.

The cake itself carries Holmes’s signature flag design: a pair of inverted white arches (evoking his eyes) framed by a boxed-in star. The black background surrounding the arches represents his skin, grounding the imagery in embodiment and identity. Inside the cake, the red and green layers quietly invoke Pan-African colors, linking the personal to the political, the individual to the collective.

Formally rich and materially lush—with glitter and gold leaf accentuating the surface—Cake is both celebration and assertion. Holmes’s compositions operate between the ceremonial and the everyday, fusing ornament with urgency. The painting invites reflection on visibility, inheritance, and the layered codes embedded in Southern Black life.