Sol’Sax was born Trevor Jemal Holtham in Kings County Hospital in 1969. Sol’Sax grew up in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn and lived there during the peak of the crack epidemic and the rise of Hip Hop. He earned a BFA with honors from Cooper Union in 1992 and an MFA with honors from Yale School of Art in 1995. Since 1991, the artist has been developing an American ancestral masquerade based on the West African ancestral masquerade called Egungun. Sol’Sax’s masqueraders are called “Sol’Sain’t” to celebrate the souls that ‘ain’t’ here no more but live on because of the African cultural retentions they used to resist European beliefs. Sol’Sax received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture in 2004. In 2005, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2008, he completed a public commission for MTA Arts for Transit at the Halsey Street “J” train station in Bushwick.