Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Holley (born February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, survival, spirituality, Black southern life, environmental transformation, and the poetics of found materials. Working across sculpture, assemblage, drawing, painting, installation, film, and music, Holley examines personal history, collective trauma, and improvisational creativity through salvaged objects, carved sandstone, and immersive environments that transform discarded matter into vessels of testimony and imagination.  Holley is a self-taught artist. He began making art in 1979 after carving sandstone memorials for two of his niece’s children who died in a house fire, and he soon developed a broader practice rooted in found-object assemblage and site-responsive installation. His work often engages memory, social history, mourning, ecology, and Black vernacular experience, using improvisation, accumulation, and material transformation to consider endurance, healing, and the afterlives of lived struggle.  His work has been exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Royal Academy of Arts. He received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2022, and his work is closely associated with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Lonnie Holley lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.