Lonnie Holley
(b. 1950)
BornBirmingham, Alabama, United States
BiographyLonnie Holley’s prolific art has spanned music, sculpture, performance, film, photography, and evocative assemblages made with found materials, all with the improvisational spirit of storytelling. Among his earliest works were sculptures, some carved in sandstone, others made with salvaged waste material from a foundry, their forms referencing depictions of Egyptian royalty and ancient African art. He expanded to using found materials and painting in assemblages, sometimes on a monumental scale, often responding to the violent legacy of slavery, racism, and oppression in the United States. Faces formed from wire, expressive abstract paintings, and wooden chairs transformed into thrones or evocations of heritage—all enshrine what others have cast off.Holley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, the seventh of twenty-seven pregnancies for his mother. As a child in the Jim Crow–era South, his early years were marked by hardship in foster homes and an abusive reform school. He worked odd jobs before discovering art in the wake of a tragedy. One of his first sculptures was a tombstone made in 1979, when a family member could not afford a marker for their children, leading to a whole sculptural environment at his Birmingham home. As he told The New York Times in 2021, “I had been thrown away as a child, and here I was building something out of unwanted things in memorial of my little nephew and niece. I discovered art as service.”
In the mid-1980s, Holley met curator and collector William Arnett, who became a major supporter of his work and featured his art in the landmark 1996 exhibition Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Holley has also curated and championed art by fellow Southern creators such as Hawkins Bolden, Thornton Dial, Sr., and Mary T. Smith. Since the early 2010s, he has been based in Atlanta. He made home recordings for years, and released his first album in 2012. He frequently uses artwork as a starting point for his songs on themes of resilience. “My life is a big experience hopefully that somebody could see it, and benefit from seeing it,” he said in a 1990s interview for Souls Grown Deep. “I tried to make art especially for the self. I tried to make art especially for the mind.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).