Irika Mei Chua Holum

Erika Mei Chua Holum is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and second-year PhD student in Art History at Rice University. Recent and forthcoming projects at the Blaffer Art Museum include the 2024 Texas Biennial, Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions with KADIST San Francisco (2024), and first solo museum exhibitions with Cian Dayrit: Liberties Were Taken (2024) and Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa ‘the water is rising (2025). She organized Ecofictions and Understories (2023-24), a city-responsive curatorial program to speculate potential worlds for gathering, resisting, and regeneration in artistic practices in conjunction with the exhibition Climate Migration with the Houston Climate Museum supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. With support from the Idea Fund, Erika launched the Sahara Dust Residency in 2024, a summer residency program activated by forms of knowledge-sharing across the temporary and migratory region created by Saharan dust clouds. They have contributed to projects and exhibitions globally, such as Majority Rule: Myth-making and survival strategies from AAPI artists at Sanman Studios (2023), makibaka! Fifty Years of Filipino-American Youth Activism at Alief Art House (2021), Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2020), the Second Edition of the Lagos Biennial in Nigeria (2019), and Obscura Festival of Photography in Malaysia (2018). Erika holds an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago, and a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Research Areas

Modern and Contemporary Art

Education

B.A., Eureka College

Honors & Awards

2024, Rice Humanities Research Center, REPAIR Grant

2024, Idea Fund Awardee

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