Amanda Holiday
Amanda Holiday was born in Sierra Leone in 1964 and moved to the north of England at the age of five. She studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and was actively involved in the UK Black arts movement, exhibiting in landmark Black art exhibitions during the 1980s, before transitioning into film.
In 1989, she directed the Arts Council–funded documentary Employing the Image, which examines the lives and work of five young Black British artists, including Sonia Boyce and Zarina Bhimji. This was followed by the one-minute film Manao Tupapau, which reanimates a Gauguin painting from the perspective of the model. Her BFI-funded experimental drama Miss Queencake reimagines elements of Gauguin’s life as a decolonial anti-narrative. From 2001 to 2010, Holiday was based in Cape Town, where she worked in educational television.
Her 1987 drawing Red Riding Hood was exhibited in Women in Revolt!, which toured from Tate Britain in 2024 to the Whitworth, Manchester, in 2025. In the same year, she undertook a UKRI travel research fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Her artworks have been included in the group exhibitions Bloom Song and Gloam, both presented by Vivienne Roberts Projects, and her drawing The Sense is currently on view in the Courtauld’s East Wing Biennial until 2027. Holiday has been selected as one of two artists representing the UK at the Malta Biennale 26.
She is currently completing a PhD in Poetry, Race and Art at the University of Brighton.
Amanda Holiday
Red Riding Hood
1987
chalk and charcoal on brown paper
189 x 214 cm
206 x 209 cm (framed size)
- First exhibited in Umbrage solo exhibition at Bedford Hill Gallery, Oct 1987
- Appeared in experimental film Umbrage made for C4/Arts Council 1989 and screened in their 11th hour slot.
- Exhibited n Untold Gold AACDD exhibition, Oxo Tower, 2012
- Exhibited in Mango Room, Camden 2013
- Exhibited in Women in Revolt! Tate Britain Nov 2023 and Whitworth 2025
This work dates from 1987 from just after I had completed the BA in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art. It was first shown in a small solo show 'Umbrage' at the Bedford Hill Gallery, Balham the same year.
It depicts a young black woman walking through the undergrowth pursued by a wolf (many think the wolf is a crocodile). The Red Riding Hood figure is based on a friend and the aeroplanes collaged into her basket come from an advertisement of the time which depicted a sky cram full of aeroplanes. I don’t recall what the ad was for but remember standing on a tube platform underground staring at this rather menacing image thinking how out of place it felt. I put aeroplanes in RRH’s basket instead of currant buns to re-create this sense of disruption. RRH is in charge and also quite nonchalant.
I had done a series of work on brown paper re-casting and re-imagining fairy tales and stories with black female protagonists including a black sleeping beauty, self-portrait as Rapunzel and Struwwelpeter among others. The narratives were not meant to be readily legible. These same ideas crossed over into my film work. Red Riding appeared in my experimental film 'Umbrage' funded by the Arts Council/Channel 4 in 1989, in which black Red Riding Hood and black wolf actors walk past this picture hanging in the street. The street it was filmed in was River Way in Greenwich, where a fellow foundation artist Damien Hirst lived along with Carl Freedman. The film Umbrage also features a black Rapunzel in a windmill.
Selected Works
