Glenis Holder is a 2002 graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. While in school she explored several disciplines including sculpture, painting, video-art and performance. She now lives and works in New York, since coming from the Carribean at the age of 18, she has been using the culture of pageantry and costuming to inform her public art projects.

In the piece called "FLIPPED", she travels the length of the a subway train in costume continually enacting a transformation.

The present work "STRIPPED/STRAPPED" continues with the relevant theme of women in different cultural contexts, concerned about their freedom. The intent is to heighten the level of awareness of people within the artist's own community where the piece is performed, about their place and time in history. The importance of a more complete understanding of their position within larger existing systems, which constantly enact various forces on the communities, (e.g. the media or, education or housing opportunities) whether or not they are aware of these forces.

Within these systems, everyone has a choice and the intention of this project is to illustrate the similar choices made by three woman in very different countries.

The emphasis is to highlight the women's voices as well as their choices in order to draw out meaningful dialogue, not only about the women's choices but about our own choices. To this end the piece is not considered complete without the input of the community where the piece is performed on the online message boards, which are an integral part of the experiment.

STRIPPED/STRAPPED is a collaboration between Glenis Holder and Adeola Enigbokan.

Adeola Enigbokan is currently institutionalized as a Teacher in New York City Public Schools. She has been described as "insubordinate", "lacking in professional attitude," and "unable to maintain good-faith relations with her supervisors." She concurs. (Adeola has never been a good Negro). Her students describe her as a "cool," and "informative."

In past incarnations, Adeola has worked as a computer technician, freelance web designer and information architect, has taught courses in graphic and web design, and run workshops on advanced computer maintenance.

As a studio technician at the Cooper Union School of Art, surrounded by profoundly inconsequential work, done by highly skilled and dangerously dedicated students, she began reflecting on her own artistic experience as a Yoruba woman growing up in Lagos, Nigeria. She compared the insularity of the New York art world with the pageantry, ritual, spirituality and populism, which animates art practice in Nigeria. She decided then that there were no lines between performance, history, pageant, spectacle, spirit and art.

At this moment of epiphany, Adeola met Glenis, and a partnership was born.

STRIPPED/STRAPPED, the duo’s first collaboration, is an exploration of women’s roles in revolutionary movements and ideology, vis á vis their agency as combatants. The project invokes the pageantry and populism of Afro-Caribbean tradition. The site of the performance (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn at the Fulton Arts Festival), was carefully chosen to speak to a shared history of revolutionary ideologies within Afro-Caribbean and African American culture, as well as to reach an audience often marginalized in the practice of "high" art. Through the website, the performance aims to generate interest and dialogue around issues of women’s roles in the liberation of oppressed people.