His albums are Just Before Music (2012), Keeping a Record of It (2013), MITH (2018), National Freedom (2020), Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a collaboration with Matthew E. White (2021), and Oh Me Oh My (2023).
Early life
Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama during the Jim Crow era.[2][4] From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house on the state fairgrounds and several foster homes. His early life was chaotic, and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. Born the seventh of 27 children, Holley claims to have been traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four.[4][5]
Before beginning his career, Holley spent time digging graves and picking cotton. He claims to have been pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car. He became a father at 15 and now has 15 children. Holley also worked as a short-order cook at Disney World. He also did time at a notorious juvenile facility, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs.[4]
Holley began his artistic life in 1979 by carving tombstones for his sister's two children, who died in a house fire. He used blocks of a soft sandstone-like byproduct of metal casting, which he found discarded in piles by a foundry near his sister's house. Holley believes that divine intervention led him to the material and inspired his artwork. Inspired similarly, he made other carvings and assembled them in his yard along with various found objects. In 1981, Holley brought a few examples of his sandstone carvings to Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray. The BMA displayed some of those pieces immediately,[4] and Murray introduced him to the organizers of the 1981 exhibition "More Than Land and Sky: Art from Appalachia" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Soon Holley work was being acquired by other institutions, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. His work has also been displayed at the White House.[6]
Holley also became a popular guest at children's art events, bringing blocks of the foundry stone for children to carve. He gets special pleasure from sharing his experience of learning to love oneself through creative activity.
Exhibition announcement, Luise Ross Gallery, New York City, 1993Lonnie Holley with his sculpture Drilling for Greedy, 2011
By the mid-1980s, Holley's work had diversified to include paintings and recycled found-object sculptures. His yard and adjacent abandoned lots near his home became an immersive art environment that was celebrated by visitors from the art world but threatened by scrap metal scavengers and, eventually, by the expansion of the Birmingham International Airport.
Holley was included in the 1996 group exhibition "Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South," an exhibition of over 450 artworks by 29 other contemporary artists, highlighting a significant artistic tradition that has risen in concert with the Civil Rights Movement. Held at Michael C. Carlos Museum at City Hall East in Atlanta, it was organized by the museum, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) Cultural Olympiad, and the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs. Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones, Jr., in his review of the show singled out Holley's work writing,
“Enter through a front yard re-created right down to the dirt floor, but a yard transformed, with broken tombstones, sprinkler heads, bedsprings, paintings, baby-doll parts—and all of it rejiggered by artist Lonnie Holley into a phantasmagorical vision as surreptitiously coherent as a dream. The rest of the show is not quite so overwhelming, but every piece is a wonder."[7]
In late 1996 Holley was notified that his hilltop property near the airport would be condemned.[4] He rejected the airport authority's offer to buy the property at the market rate of $14,000; knowing that his site-specific installation had personal and artistic value, he demanded $250,000. The dispute went to probate court, and in 1997 a settlement was reached and the airport authority paid $165,700 to move Holley's family and work to a larger property in Harpersville, Alabama.
Holley's first major retrospective, Do We Think Too Much? I Don't Think We Can Ever Stop: Lonnie Holley, A Twenty-Five Year Survey, was organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art and traveled in 2003 to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England. From May 2003 to May 2004, Holley created a "sprawling, sculptural environment" in the lower sculpture garden at the Birmingham Museum of Art as part of their "Perspectives" series of site-specificinstallations. The creation of the work was documented in the film The Sandman's Garden by Arthur Crenshaw and in photographs by Alice Faye "Sister" Love.
Holley installed sculptural work for the exhibition Groundstory: Tales From the Shade of the South, at Agnes Scott College of Decatur, Georgia, which ran at the Dalton Gallery (also in Decatur) from September 28 to November 17, 2012. In 2022, Holley was named a Fellow and received an unrestricted cash award from United States Artists (USA), a Chicago-based arts funding organization.
In 2015, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston presented Holley's first solo museum exhibition since 1994, featuring a residency, video, concert, and monographic catalog entitled "Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley."[10] The exhibition showcased some of Holley’s assemblage works since the early 1990s. For the residency, he created works on-site and visited with school groups and College of Charleston classes.[11]
In 2018, his work was part of the exhibition "History Refused to Die" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary Black artists from the American South. It marked the Souls Grown Deep Foundation's 2014 gift of works to the museum.[13] The Wall Street Journal reviewer called it "a sharply focused, elegantly installed selection" and the reviewer from The Art Newspaper described the show as "a salve to see an exhibition as succinct, as purposeful, intelligently designed and filled with good art."[14][15]
Other group exhibitions marking respective institutional acquisitions from the Atlanta-based foundation include "Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2019,[16] "What Carried Us Over: Gifts from the Gordon W. Bailey Collection" at the Pérez Art Museum Miami,[17] "Living Legacies: Art of the African American South" at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2022,[18] and "Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[19]
Holley's professional music career began in 2006[23] when he made improvisational vocal recordings, at the urging of Matt Arnett (son of William Arnett), in an Alabama church using just a keyboard and a microphone.[24] In 2012, he released his debut album Just Before Music on the Dust-to-Digital label, followed by Keeping a Record of It the following year. In September 2018, he released his third album MITH on Jagjaguwar.[25]Pitchfork gave it' a 7.9 out of 10 rating.[26]
Pitchfork gave Holley's 2020 album National Freedom a 8.0 out of 10 rating.[27]
In April 2021, Holley released a collaboration album with Matthew E. White titled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection.[28] Also in 2022, he has begun to record his fourth album, Oh Me Oh My, which was released on March 10, 2023 to critical acclaim:[29]Pitchfork gave it a 8.5 out of 10 rating,[30] and Paste included it on its list of the Top 10 albums of 2023,[31] and the Washington Post interviewed Holley for it.[32]
Discography
Just Before Music (2012)
Keeping a Record of It (2013)
Live on the Modern World with DJ Trouble – April 2013
MITH (2018)
National Freedom (2020)
Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection (2021) – with Matthew E. White
Thomas "Sam" Doyle (1906–1985) was an African-American artist from Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. His colorful paintings on sheet metal and wood recorded the history and people of St. Helena's Gullah community.
David Moos is the president of David Moos Art Advisory and a co-founder of The Museum Exchange.
The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River.
Thornton Dial was a pioneering American artist who came to prominence in the late 1980s. Dial's body of work exhibits formal variety through expressive, densely composed assemblages of found materials, often executed on a monumental scale. His range of subjects embraces a broad sweep of history, from human rights to natural disasters and current events. Dial's works are widely held in American museums; ten of Dial's works were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014.
Maxwell L. Anderson is an American art historian, former museum administrator, and non-profit executive, who currently serves as President of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Anderson previously served as Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998 to 2003, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art from 2006 to 2011, and director of Dallas Museum of Art from 2011 to 2015.
William Sidney Arnett was an Atlanta-based writer, editor, curator and art collector who built internationally important collections of African, Asian, and African American art. Arnett was the founder and chairman of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of African American art from the Deep South that works in coordination with leading museums and scholars to produce groundbreaking exhibitions and publications using its extensive holdings. His efforts produced 13 books with nearly 100 essays by 73 authors. Thirty-eight museums have hosted major exhibitions, and comprehensive archives are maintained at UNC Chapel Hill. The White House has shown the collection. Arnett exhibited works from these collections and delivered lectures at over 100 museums and educational institutions in the United States and abroad. He is perhaps best known for writing about and collecting the work of African American artists from the Deep South. Arnett was named one of the "100 Most Influential Georgians" by Georgia Trend Magazine in January 2015. He died on August 12, 2020.
Lorenzo Scott is a contemporary American artist whose work gained prominence in the late 1980s.
Souls Grown Deep Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and promoting the work of leading contemporary African American artists from the Southeastern United States. Its mission is to include their contributions in the canon of American art history through acquisitions from its collection by major museums, as well as through exhibitions, programs, and publications. The foundation derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes (1902–1967) titled "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the last line of which is "My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Mary Tillman Smith (1904–1995) was a self-taught painter of the American South who lived and worked in Mississippi most of her life. She created bold, colorful, and expressive paintings, usually using house paint on wood or tin. Her work consists of highly stylized figures in strong colors, often with animating dots and dashes, alongside sometimes cryptically abstracted texts laid upon monochrome contrasting background colors. Her work is shown throughout the world and collected by museums, most famously by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as numerous other museums including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum; as well as the collections of Tufts University, Willamette University, and the University of Mississippi. She has received solo shows at galleries in the United States and Europe, and has been included in numerous group shows. She is considered a Southern self-taught artist, a group that includes Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe. Her work was heavily promoted by the curator and collector William Arnett.
Mary Lee Bendolph is an American quilt maker of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. Her work has been influential on subsequent quilters and artists and her quilts have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country. Bendolph uses fabric from used clothing for quilting in appreciation of the "love and spirit" with old cloth. Bendolph has spent her life in Gee's Bend and has had work featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota.
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is a non-profit, non-collecting contemporary art institute within the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. The HICA presents contemporary art exhibitions by emerging or mid-career artists. The Halsey is housed in the Marion and Wayland H. Cato Jr. Center for the Arts at 161 Calhoun Street, in the heart of downtown Charleston. The Halsey features two gallery spaces—the Deborah A. Chalsty Gallery and the South Gallery—together comprising 3,000 square feet of exhibition space. Mark Sloan was Director and Chief Curator of the Halsey from 1994 to 2020. Katie Hirsch became the director in April 2021.
Lucy Marie (Young) Mingo is an American quilt maker and member of the Gee's Bend Collective from Gee's Bend (Boykin), Alabama. She was an early member of the Freedom Quilting Bee, which was an alternative economic organization created in 1966 to raise the socio-economic status of African-American communities in Alabama. She was also among the group of citizens who accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist who has created a new genre of quilting that has transformed the medium. Although quilting has long been considered a craft, her interdisciplinary methods—which create quilts that look like paintings—have catapulted quilting into the field of fine art. She is known for her vibrant, quilted portraits celebrating Black life, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures. Her works now count among the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami and about a dozen other art museums nationwide. She has also exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Epcot Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and many other venues. In 2020, she was commissioned to quilt cover images for Time magazine, including the "Person of the Year" issue and its "100 Women of the Year" issue. With a multi-year wait list for private commissions, one of Butler's quilts sold at auction in 2021 for $75,000 USD.
Joe Minter is an African American sculptor based in Birmingham, Alabama. His African Village in America, on the southwest edge of Birmingham, is an ever-evolving art environment populated by sculptures he makes from scrap metal and found materials; its theme is recognition of African American history from the first arrivals of captured Africans to the present. Individual pieces from Minter's thirty-year project have been in major exhibitions in the United States and are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.
Sally Mae Pettway Mixon is an American artist. She is associated with the Gee's Bend quilting collective, alongside her mother, Candis Pettway, and her sisters Qunnie Pettway and Edwina Pettway.
Flora Moore is an American artist associated with the Gee's Bend group of quilters.
Ralph Griffin (1925–1992) was an American sculptor known for his sculptures made from tree roots.
Charlie Lucas is a contemporary sculptor born in Pink Lily, Alabama, who now lives and works in Selma, Alabama. He is owner and operator of the Tin Man Studio, part gallery and part studio, in Selma.
Leroy Person (1907–1985) was an American sculptor and wood carver from a remote region in northeastern North Carolina. Person's sculptures, and later, drawings, are recognized for their particular sensitivity to color and surface markings.
Henry Speller (1900–1997) was an American artist and blues musician working in Memphis, Tennessee. His style of drawing and painting is characterized by ornate, colorful, intimidating figures which he likened to "characters from Dallas".
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