1. Lonnie Holley is best known for his assemblages and immersive environments made of found materials.
21 Facts About Lonnie Holley
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Lonnie Holley's albums are Just Before Music, Keeping a Record of It, MITH, National Freedom, Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a collaboration with Matthew E White, Oh Me Oh My, and Tonky.
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Lonnie Holley was born on February 10,1950, in Birmingham, Alabama during the Jim Crow era.
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Lonnie Holley lived in a whiskey house on the state fairgrounds and several foster homes.
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Lonnie Holley became a father at 15 and now has 15 children.
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Lonnie Holley did time at a notorious juvenile facility, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs.
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Lonnie Holley began his artistic life in 1979 by carving tombstones for his sister's two children, who died in a house fire.
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Lonnie Holley 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.
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Lonnie Holley believes that divine intervention led him to the material and inspired his artwork.
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In 1981, Lonnie Holley brought a few examples of his sandstone carvings to Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray.
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The BMA displayed some of those pieces immediately, 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, DC Soon Lonnie 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.
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Lonnie Holley's work has been displayed at the White House.
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Lonnie Holley became a popular guest at children's art events, bringing blocks of the foundry stone for children to carve.
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Lonnie Holley gets special pleasure from sharing his experience of learning to love oneself through creative activity.
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Lonnie 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.
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In late 1996 Lonnie Holley was notified that his hilltop property near the airport would be condemned.
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Lonnie Holley 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.
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From May 2003 to May 2004, Lonnie 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-specific installations.
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Lonnie 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 from September 28 to November 17,2012.
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In 2022, Lonnie Holley was named a Fellow and received an unrestricted cash award from United States Artists, a Chicago-based arts funding organization.
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Two years later, Lonnie Holley's work was featured with 61 others in "Revelations: Art from the African American South" at the de Young Museum to mark the debut of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco major acquisition from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta of 62 works.