Making Art from Silence and Movement

Kaes Holkeboer, an LSA computer science and arts and ideas in the humanities student (left), and his mother, Kristine Bolhuis (A.B. 1993), share their arts practices in their Ann Arbor family home. Both are proud to have developed their artistic sensibilities at the Residential College. Photography by Natalie Condon

Each night, as Kaes Holkeboer goes to bed, the world around him returns to the way it was when he was born.

“Whenever I go to sleep, I take my hearing aids off and I’m deaf again,” he says. Holkeboer was born with a rare genetic syndrome called Treacher Collins, a condition that made him deaf at birth because he has no ear canals to transmit sound.

The LSA senior was just eight weeks old when he was fitted for his first hearing aids. His parents noticed that he was a preternaturally good listener, always tuned into ambient music and conversation.

Being able to experience total silence is rare, he points out, and it’s a hallmark of his own musical talent. “It’s uncomfortable at first, but then you start hearing things that aren’t even real.

“I never take sound and hearing for granted,” he says.

His mother, Kristine Bolhuis (A.B. 1993), wonders if he “developed a higher level of listening than your average human just because he had to concentrate a little harder.” Her son grew up surrounded by music: singing, playing instruments, and attending his father’s gigs. His parents put him in cello and piano lessons, and when he got to Ann Arbor’s Community High School, he started playing jazz. That was when it all clicked.

“I fell in love with piano then,” Holkeboer says. He was determined to follow in his parents’ footsteps of artistic exploration: his mom creates intricate, sculptural jewelry; his dad, John Holkeboer, is a musician who performed in the University Symphony Orchestra as a U-M music student and performed in a series of bands. The couple’s daughter, Corinne, is a painter. 

When it came time to apply to college, Holkeboer felt like he had a direct path. “I thought it was really likely that I would end up at U-M,” he says. Not only did he appreciate the breadth of subjects he could study at LSA, but he’d also be just a quick bus ride away from his specialists at U-M’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. Once he got in, he had another decision to make: Where would he choose to live?

Bolhuis was unsure whether her son would want to live at the Residential College, as she did as an LSA student in the 1990s, but she proposed it anyway. There were notable parallels between the RC and Community High School: an intimate environment for learning, horizontal pedagogy, and a focus on art. “The Community connection makes sense,” she told him. “So why not?”

As a composer whose current work is based entirely on samples, Holkeboer is inspired by the media that has always surrounded him. Bolhuis agrees. “He’s always been a voracious media consumer,” she says. Video by Natalie Condon

Holkeboer’s music practice flourished at the RC; not only was he able to explore his standard genres of classical music and jazz, but he joined chamber groups that spanned an array of subcategories. He learned the accordion. He joined a tango band, and then a bossa nova band.

Holkeboer’s interests expand beyond music, and he has declared a second major: arts and ideas in the humanities. As part of a generation that grew up with the internet and quickly developed a complex relationship with it, he is also drawn to understanding the role of technology in the modern world. “Everything is data,” he says, “and the only thing that changes is how you interpret it. It’s affected how I think about art in the world.” The tension between the digital and real worlds transfixed him, and, in the last few years, he has combined his interests in computer science and fine arts and begun to make computer-based music.

He frequently sees his parents at home and around town, particularly when he and his band are gigging at the Blue Llama on Main Street or at Ann Arbor’s summer festivals.

Growing up in Holland, Michigan, in the 1980s, Kristine Bolhuis knew exactly what she wanted out of her college experience: art, Ann Arbor, and more art. When she wrote to LSA to receive application materials, she had already decided that she would major in history of art: she studied music, ceramics, and language in high school. 

Bolhuis’s mother was nervous about her going to a big school like U-M. When she caught wind of the Residential College, she encouraged Bolhuis to apply so she would have a small liberal arts school experience while taking advantage of all LSA had to offer. And indeed, it was the perfect match.

At the RC, Bolhuis dove into her studies. She took more ceramics classes, crafting a vase that is still on display in her home. She learned to read objects and constantly observe her surroundings, noticing forms and patterns in nature and architecture that she wanted to reinterpret.

“I have a busy mind,” she says. “I’m always abstracting things.” Two of her professors, Larry Cressman and Susan Crowell, encouraged her to grow as a student and artist; eventually, she realized that her true love was not just studying art, but making it. After graduation, she and her husband moved to the East Coast, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art in metalsmithing. A few years later, after moving back to Michigan, she was awarded a Master of Fine Arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. “I did not fully appreciate how impactful the RC was in my life until I was a full-on grown-up,” she says.

In her adult life, art was all around her. She created a sculpture series called “Talking Through a Closed Window,” which was inspired by her experience raising Kaes, using sign language to communicate with him. Her metalworking practice grew into a business, where she had the freedom to explore her interest in kinetic jewelry: multijointed mesh shapes that shift and evoke ladders and scraps of lace.

It took the better part of a decade for Bolhuis to establish her arts practice. She went back to art school after graduating from U-M. Video by Tatum Poirier

Having settled in Ferndale, Bolhuis and her husband found themselves shuttling Kaes back and forth to Mott and to see John’s family in Ann Arbor. They decided their lives would be easier if they moved back to the city where they first met. “Mott is so wonderful,” she says, “and they follow patients through a long chunk of their lives.” 

Bolhuis often finds their home filled with music from the ground floor, where Kaes’s childhood piano is located right next to her metalworking studio. 

Whispers of LSA and the RC manifest in infinite ways in the Bolhuis-Holkeboer home: the magenta flame from the blowtorch, the plinking of piano keys, the harmony of a family creating together.