Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Holley (1950-) is a self-taught artist and musician from Birmingham, Jefferson County. Best known for his assemblage sculptures pieced together from found materials, Holley began making art in the late 1970s following a childhood and adolescence full of personal hardships. He is associated with Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Joe Minter, fellow self-taught artists linked by their use of assemblage techniques and recurring themes that include spirituality, racial injustice, and personal history. Together, they make up the Birmingham-Bessemer School of Art. Holley’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in major museum collections across the United States.

Born on February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Lonnie Bradley Holley was the seventh of 27 children born to Arthur James Bradley and Dorothy May Holley Crawford. According to Holley, at 18 months old, his mother placed him in the temporary care of a women working as a burlesque dancer at a carnival. The woman did not return him to his mother, instead keeping him for several years. Arriving back in Birmingham in 1954, the woman brought Holley with her to a “shot house” (an unlicensed bar) near the city fairgrounds. There, the bar’s owner, a Mrs. McElroy, traded a bottle of whiskey for custody of the malnourished child, naming him “Tonky McElroy.” McElroy, known to Holley as “Big Mama,” enrolled him at Princeton Elementary and began taking him to Rising Star Baptist Church. He spent his early years with the McElroys on Lomb Avenue, frequenting the fairground and exploring the Valley Creek stream. Holley has related that following Big Mama’s death, he began receiving regular beatings from Mr. McElroy, who blamed the then-seven year old boy for his wife’s death. Fleeing punishment, Holley was struck by a car as he crossed the street and was dragged for two and a half blocks. As a result of his injuries, he spent several months in a coma.

Determined to find his birth mother, Holley has said that he ran away from home on several occasions, once making it as far as New Orleans, but was returned to Mr. McElroy each time. As told by Holley, at 12 years old, he unknowingly violated a curfew imposed across Birmingham by public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and was sent to juvenile detention in Birmingham. Along with several older boys, Holley broke out, stole a car, and crashed into a telephone pole. Without a hearing, he was sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a reform school known locally as “Mt. Meigs,” in Montgomery County. (The facility was taken over by the Alabama Department of Youth Services in the early 1970s.) While there, Holley performed manual labor, including working the cotton fields in the summer, and was regularly beaten for failing to meet the required daily quota of 100 pounds of cotton harvested. After reaching Tuskegee, Macon County, during an escape attempt, he was sent back to Mt. Meigs, where he was severely lashed and sentenced to months-long isolation outdoors on a rock pile. In 1963, Holley’s paternal grandmother, Hixie Canady (called Momo), facilitated his release and reunited him with his birth name. Back in Birmingham, he reunited with his mother, Dorothy, who lived with her father on land near the city’s airport.  

Holley later went to live with his brother, Sonny, in Orlando, Florida, where he worked as a groundskeeper and dishwasher at a country club. Then almost 15, he learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. Holley has recounted that in order to earn extra money, he joined a busload of seasonal workers heading to Lima, Ohio, to pick tomatoes for the Campbell’s Soup Company (present-day Campbell’s Company) but was shortchanged his wages by the bus driver who managed the workers’ earnings. Upon his return to Orlando, Holley was unable to locate his girlfriend and went to work as a cook at Walt Disney World’s Contemporary Resort. He remained in Florida for five years and fathered four children before moving back to Birmingham in 1971. Witnessing his mother, siblings, and friends living in poor conditions, Holley grew increasingly depressed and in 1978 went to jail after leading police officers on a car chase. Following this incident, he grew determined to turn his life around. Holley credits art with saving his life.

Having learned from his grandfather, grandmother, and uncle how to salvage discarded objects, he began sculpting from found materials, including scraps from the city’s foundries, such as a sandstone-like material left over from furnace castings. After his sister lost two children in a house fire in 1979, Holley carved their gravestones from this sandstone-like material, marking the beginning of his career as an artist. In 1981, he brought several of his pieces to Richard Murray, then-director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, who promptly put them on display. Two of Holley’s works, Baby Being Born (1979-80) and Time (1979-80), were included in the Smithsonian’s 1981 exhibition, More Than Land or Sky: Art from Appalachia. These initial works created in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Ruling for the Child (1982) and Untitled (God) (1983), are carved from the sandstone-like material, but he diversified his use of materials as his artistry progressed.

In 1982-83, Holley traveled to local schools to demonstrate stone-carving to students, earning the moniker "The Sandman." The next year, he purchased the land adjacent to his familial home on Airport Hill and began building an immersive art environment in his yard, referring to this installation as “one square acre of art.” In the mid-1980s, Holley met William Arnett, a collector and leading patron of African American artists. Arnett was impressed by Holley’s work and became a champion of his art, introducing it to curators, critics, and major institutions, and thereby legitimizing Holley’s work within the mainstream art world. (Arnett was also important in promoting other Alabama artists, including Thornton Dial, Ronnie Lockett, and some Gee’s Bend quilters.)

In 1996, Holley was notified that his property would be condemned for the expansion of the present-day Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. After rejecting the city’s initial offer of $14,000, Holley received $165,700 in compensation for his property, and his yard show was subsequently demolished. Holley relocated to Harpersville, Shelby County, with five of his children and began rebuilding his art environment, though his arrival was met with skepticism from the town’s residents. He resided in Harpersville until 2010, when he relocated to Atlanta. He has been married at least once and has 15 children.

From childhood, Holley took an interest in collecting discarded objects and materials and repurposing them, a practice that informed his artistic production. His artwork, often crafted from discarded wire, rusted metal, and weathered wood, reflects numerous themes, including personal struggle, family, ancestors, enslavement, segregation, environmental disaster, and death. In Blood on the Rock Pile (2003), composed of rocks, wire, and red paint, Holley recalls his solitary punishment spent on the rock pile at Mt. Meigs. He pays tribute to his ancestors in Him and Her Hold the Root (1994). This sculpture features a large tree root, symbolizing his connection to his ancestral lineage, draped across two wooden rocking chairs that belonged to his grandparents. The Fifth Child Burning (1994), referencing the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, includes a collection of items salvaged from a house fire that took the life of a son’s classmate. Other works, such as Beyond the Stone Carvers (2023), showcase Holley’s intricate manipulation of wire.

In 2004, the Birmingham Museum of Art hosted a 25-year retrospective of Holley’s career. During a 2020 residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in New York, Holley completed a series of paintings in which he used layers of spray paint to create visual depth and complexity. The Influence of Images (2020) is characteristic of these painted works, which feature silhouetted faces and abstract, colorful backgrounds.

Just as William Arnett had advocated for Holley’s art career, his son, Matt, encouraged Holley’s musical pursuits. Primarily a keyboard player, Holley began recording songs on cassette tapes in the 1990s. A mix of gospel, jazz, blues, electronic, and folk, his music is improvisational, and his stream-of-consciousness vocals draw on experiences from his past as well as current events. Holley released his debut album, Just Before Music, in 2012. Tonky, released in March 2025, marks his eighth studio album.

Holley continues to exhibit his artwork and perform his music both nationally and internationally. His solo exhibitions have included shows at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2015), Parrish Art Museum (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2023), and Camden Art Centre (2024). His work is held in numerous permanent collections including the Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.