Ronald Lockett
(1965–1998)
BornBessemer, Alabama, United States
ActiveBessemer, Alabama, United States
DiedBessemer, Alabama, United States
Biography“My artwork is a part of me, whether it’s good or bad, whether people like it—it’s a part of what I do from the heart,” Ronald Lockett said in a 1996 interview. Every painting and assemblage that he created in his too-brief career was imbued with raw emotion as he transformed salvaged materials into meditations on the vulnerability of humanity and nature. He collaged rusted metal to evoke the violence of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and ensnared his paintings of wild animals with scraps of wood and chain-link fence. Life was often not easy for Lockett, and he turned his awareness of what it feels like to be downtrodden into work that reclaimed what others cast off.Lockett spent his entire life in Bessemer, the working-class suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born in 1965. After high school, rather than going to college to study art, he decided to stay home and learn from his older cousin and neighbor, the artist Thornton Dial. Dial had befriended Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley—also self-taught Black artists from Birmingham who, without access to a formal art education, had blazed their own paths using materials discarded in the wake of the area’s industrial decline. Inspired by these artists’ resourcefulness, Lockett began making mixed-media pieces in the late 1980s, with themes referencing survival and the legacy of racism in the American South. In the mid-1990s, he shifted from painting on wood surfaces to sheet metal, layering the corroded material in a technique informed by the quiltmaking of his great-aunt Sarah Dial Lockett.
Lockett’s art became more abstract over time, as he responded to ideas of faith, love, resilience, and his own mortality following his HIV diagnosis. A frequent avatar was a stag deer, appearing entangled in the detritus of a world in collapse. In 1998, age thirty-two, Lockett died from AIDS-related pneumonia, having created over 350 pieces yet receiving little institutional recognition. The first retrospective of his work—Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett—was organized by the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and opened at the American Folk Art Museum in 2016.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
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