Ronald Lockett

Ronald Lockett (1965-1998) was a self-taught visual artist from Bessemer, Jefferson County, and a central figure in the Birmingham-Bessemer School of Art, along with Thornton Dial (1928-2016), Joe Minter (1943- ), and Lonnie Holley (1950- ). Connected by shared experiences and geographic proximity, the artists of the Birmingham-Bessemer School of Art worked primarily through the medium of sculpture and found objects to comment on civil rights and racial injustice. Although Lockett worked with mixed media like tin, paint, and wood throughout his career, he is best known for his metal sculptures, also known as assemblages, produced in the 1990s. He used his compositions to address personal loss as well as sweeping social themes, including human-made environmental disaster, racial violence, and religion.

Lockett was born in Bessemer to Short Lockett and Betty Jones Lockett on May 20, 1965, and raised in the city’s working-class Pipe Shop neighborhood. He had four siblings. He displayed a penchant for drawing from childhood but never pursued formal artistic training. Instead, he watched art programs on television, read books at the public library, and began developing his craft under the guidance of cousin Thornton Dial, a renowned self-taught artist who lived with Lockett relatives several houses away on Fifteenth Street. He graduated from Hueytown High School in 1984 and remained in his mother’s Pipe Shop home all his life, using the family garage as his personal studio. Described by art collector William Arnett as quiet, observant, and introspective, Lockett stated that he often turned to creative expression as a refuge when feelings of inner uncertainty arose. 

Sarah Lockett's Roses

Lockett began experimenting with mixed media in the late 1980s. These early works are characterized by combinations of enamel paint and found materials, including nails, sticks, metal, and wire affixed to wood. Growing up in the post-civil rights era, several of Lockett’s textured collages contend with the fraught history of racial injustice in the South. In Civil Rights Marchers (1988), Lockett combines wood, cut tin, mattress springs, and rubber with puddles and splashes of red, blue, and black paint, reminiscent of abstract artist Jackson Pollock’s expressive brushstrokes. In the charred, desolate scene depicted in Smoke-Filled Sky (You Can Burn a Man’s House but Not His Dreams)(1990), he confronts the destructive activity of the Ku Klux Klan.

Like his mentor Thornton Dial, Lockett used animal motifs in his compositions as tools of autobiographical visual storytelling. The deer, serving as Lockett's avatar, held particular significance in his narratives. In his Traps series, Lockett depicts deer in states of entrapment, ensnared by fragments of chain-link fence, netting, and chicken wire. In these pieces produced throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lockett expresses the vulnerabilities faced by Black men and critiques humans’ harmful intervention in nature. In late January 1990, Lockett’s brother David, a specialist in the U. S. Army, was captured by Iraqi forces during the Gulf War and held prisoner. As the family waited to learn David’s fate, Lockett was moved to create Instinct for Survival (1990), in which a deer stands alert against an unseen threat. (David was among the first Americans released in March 1991.)

Lockett’s style underwent a dramatic shift in 1993-94. He replaced paint-on-wood as his preferred medium with rusted sheets of metal salvaged from abandoned sheds. His mastery of this new approach is evident in his Oklahoma series (1995), produced after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In these six square assemblages, Lockett layers pieces of rusted metal with found materials in an abstract conceptualization of the ravaged building. In July 1995, family matriarch Sarah Lockett died at age 105. Inspired by Sarah’s handmade quilts and flower gardens, Lockett honored his great aunt with Sarah Lockett's Roses (1997), in which he layers squares of painted tin adorned with metal roses to evoke a traditional block quilt pattern.  

A Place in Time

Around 1994-95, Lockett and his girlfriend were diagnosed with HIV. Shortly thereafter in 1996, Lockett revisited his deer avatar in Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die. A poignant addition to his Traps series, this work prefigures the artist’s death from AIDS-related pneumonia on August 23, 1998. He had produced some 350 to 400 works over the course of his career. Despite his short life, his legacy lives on largely through the efforts of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to amplifying and preserving the voices and contributions of Black southern artists. Lockett's art has been featured in exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C,, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art in Auburn, Lee County. Notably, The Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett was the first solo and retrospective exhibition of Lockett’s work organized in 2016-17 by the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and also shown at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.