Lonnie Holley

b. 1950 · Birmingham, Alabama, USA

He carved his first works, tombstones for his sister’s two children, from foundry sandstone in 1979. He has not stopped making for a single day since.

The life

Holley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, the seventh of 27 children, and grew up in brutal poverty in the Jim Crow South, working from the age of five and passing through foster homes, a whiskey house and the state fairground. In 1979, when his sister’s two children died in a house fire, he carved their tombstones from discarded sandstone-like material from a nearby foundry, and art took hold of his life. Through the 1980s and 90s he built an immersive sculptural environment on his land near Birmingham airport; when the airport condemned the property, he fought for a settlement and moved on, first to Harpersville, then Atlanta. In 2012 he released his first album, Just Before Music, opening a celebrated second career in music.

The work

Sculpture assembled from salvaged wire, roots, stone and cast-off objects, in the oldest tradition of African American yard art, alongside drawing, painting, photography, performance and sound. Each piece memorialises people, places and events. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and his albums, including MITH and Oh Me Oh My, carry the same improvisational spirit.

Why we love them

Grief handed him a chisel and he built a whole cosmology with it. The rare artist whose singing and sculpture are the same material.

Go deeper

• Lonnie Holley at the Outsider Art Fair
• Lonnie Holley on Wikipedia
• Souls Grown Deep Foundation
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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