1511621015Ronald Lockett19651998“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—<em>Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett</em>—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). RonaldLocketthttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/4721/fullThe art of Ronald Lockett speaks to the universality of the human condition through the lens of lived experience in the American South. Working within the artistic traditions of found materials, Lockett addressed themes of racial, economic, and political unrest, including the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement and environmental degradation. Locket’s art also examines his own mortality and celebrates the power of the women in his life, his longing for romantic love, and his deeply held religious faith.Born and raised in the Pipe Shop neighborhood of Bessemer, Alabama, Lockett came of age among a close-knit family in a city marked by industrial decline. His elder cousin was the artist Thornton Dial (1928–2016), who mentored and encouraged him. A key figure in Lockett’s and Dial’s creative life was the family matriarch, Sarah Dial Lockett, who schooled both men in faith and history, as well as through the creative wellspring of everyday life that was displayed in her quilts, rose gardens, and meals that she made and served. Lockett turned his attention to artmaking full-time in his early twenties. By the time of his death at age 32 from AIDS-related pneumonia, he had produced more than 350 works.Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Lockett’s art fits squarely into evolving histories of American art during the late twentieth century. Lockett was a core figure in a community of artists including Dial, Lonnie Holley (b. 1950), and Joe Minter (b. 1943), whose work flourished in the African American communities of Birmingham and Bessemer. Bernard L. Herman, “Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett,” in Valérie Rousseau (ed.) <i>Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett / Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die</i>, exhibition brochure (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2016).(1965–1998)BessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerBessemerRonald Lockett