The ‘insider’s outsider artist’ builds worlds from found objects and a rich personal history

As told to K. Leander Williams

Lonnie Holley on making treasures from trash

‘In terms of art, the roots of what I’ve learned to do go all the way back to my experiences at four and five years old in the ditches and creeks that were behind the house where we lived in Alabama. The creeks had animals like tadpoles and crayfish that would burrow themselves down into the dirt. The ditches had whatever people throw away. I used to run around and mess with it all, like children do. To this day, I would say that I’m most at home in the grit, finding what’s called trash.

‘Ditches were one part [of my childhood]; fairgrounds were the other. Where I lived in Birmingham was where they set up carnivals, the state fair. I got to watch it all – from when the tent went up to when it came down. At one point we lived across from a drive-in theater, where I could see the movies from the roof of the house. Don’t ask me names – I was little – but I watched every movie that played.
‘I didn’t set out to make art. I didn’t know what art was. My first pieces came about when I made a tombstone for my sister’s children, my nieces who died in a fire in 1979. My own mother had 27 children. I found some sandstone, which the iron foundries in Alabama used to make molds for metal piping, in another of my sisters’ front yards. It had been buried there, in big pieces, as landfill. It was fragile but firm enough for me to be able to work with: I used a crosscut saw that was among my grandfather’s tools to cut it down to where I could manipulate and shape it with a knife, fork, and spoon.

‘I liked working with sandstone, so, after making the tombstone, I kept carving. At this time, I was mostly a short-order cook. I had brought some of the carvings I had done to mortuaries to see if they could use them, but they told me that, compared to marble and granite, sandstone was too soft and not permanent. 
‘By the time I’d been carving for about a year, I already had more than 100 pieces, some of them in sand, some where I’d used paint, and some were sand-drippings. But I didn’t know what to do with them. That all changed when a woman I will never forget named Sarah Kelly, who was like an auntie to me, said: “You should take your work to town and stop waiting for town to come to you.”
‘So, I loaded up my car and took my works to the Birmingham Museum of Art, where a woman brought them to the attention of the director, Richard Murray. He came out and started looking at the pieces and asked me about pigments and things that I didn’t know anything about. He used the word “prolific,” which I had never heard before, then he asked me what different pieces meant, and I explained what I was thinking about when I carved them. Two of those pieces, Baby Being Born
and Time, ended up in the Smithsonian exhibition “More than Land or Sky: Art from Appalachia” [1981]. Baby Being Born was inspired by my son Ezekiel’s sonogram. His was the first one I’d seen. Being in that show enabled me to go to Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian brought all the artists there for two weeks, and we just went from gallery to gallery looking at art. The time I spent there made a big impression on me.

‘Some time after that, my wife and I bought a house near Birmingham International Airport. I had been doing carving demonstrations for children in the school system. The kids gave me a nickname: “Sandman.” Our house was on an acre of land and there was more land next door, also about an acre. Taking the example of my grandfather, who it seemed could use whatever was around to just build what he needed, I started filling up my yard and that other land with works, sculptures made from scrap metal, stones, cloth, wood, wire, anything I could find. Although we would have to move several years later, when the situation with the airport got too intense [the airport’s expansion led to a legal battle and settlement], by then I was looking at what I was doing as creative expression. Art, to me, is the power current of cultural output.

‘I was also aware that some people did not see my art that way. They downplayed what I was doing, despite the interest from Murray and Anne Arrasmith, who ran Space One Eleven in downtown Birmingham, where I was invited to work. 
‘Around 1985, someone told a collector and art historian named William Arnett about me. He came by to see my yard environment and was very excited by it. Bill was a special person, curious about&nbsp; all different kinds of human expression. He had an interest in what he called “African vernacular art” – people like me, Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, and the quilters of Gee’s Bend. I have been working with Bill’s family ever since, and it’s through their interest that all of our work began to receive the wider recognition it has now. [In 2010, Arnett created a foundation for Southern artists called Souls Grown Deep to do just that.]

‘I began to do music in 2010. I had always sung and, some time before that, I’d found a keyboard at Goodwill and was working with it. I liked to moan and groan the way I’d heard people in my family sing. It wasn’t formal, just something everybody liked to do. I got the chance to record when Bill’s son, Matt, created a studio in Gee’s Bend to record music by the quilters. Some of the music they made ended up in the Library of Congress. Matt let me come in and play after the sessions he was doing with them. 
‘Music was another way of what I call thought-smithing, so my brain just went to work and, before too long, I had some different pieces. I was just moaning, doing my thing, thinking about this and that, and letting it come out. Like many of the things I’ve been given the privilege to do in art, it involved a kind of gamble, then a learning process.'

K. Leander Williams, a staffer at The New Yorker, has been around the block a few times and has yet to tire of the scenery. 
<a href="https://parisplus.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/25869/Lonnie-Holley" target="_blank">Lonnie Holley</a> is represented by <a href="https://parisplus.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1070/Blum?lang=en">Blum </a>(Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo); and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2670/Edel-Assanti" target="_blank">Edel Assanti</a>&nbsp;(London). Blum will feature the artist in a solo presentation at Paris+ par Art Basel, and Edel Assanti will show his work in the Nova sector at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Caption for full-bleed image:&nbsp;Lonnie Holley. Photograph by David Raccuglia. © Lonnie Holley / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Blum.
Published on October 14, 2023.

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