CINEMA Lonnie Holley Alabama. Recycling. Found Objects. The Sand Man. Dust-to-Digital. Words Andy Thomas Portrait Jerry Buttles Photographs William Arnett courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation soulsgrowndeep.org Lonnie Holley is a self-taught visual have money to bury the kids or get them mother but ended up in detention. After artist turned avant-garde musician whose grave markers. I was just trying to think numerous escape attempts, he was sent recycled assemblage and free improvising of something to keep my sister from to the notorious correctional facility, the puts him somewhere between Sun Ra being so upset. I went to another sister’s Alabama Industrial School for Negro and Robert Rauschenberg. Going by the house near a foundry and I came across Children. “I was almost beaten to death name the Sand Man, the Alabama artist this core sand. I picked a piece and took there,” he recalls. “I’d get a whooping rose from obscurity in the 1980s to have it to my grandfather’s house. I started every day for not knowing how to pick his found-art sculptures displayed by the cutting the stone. With the crosscut saw cotton. Every single day.” Word fi nally Smithsonian American Art Museum. it was such an even and smooth cut, it got to his grandma, who picked Holley His supporters are many: collector showed me I could work it easily. This up and went on to raise him. After the William Arnett, who discovered Holley was the fi rst time I had made anything 1979 accident, he entered a period of while researching African-American art that later I got to know as art.” depression and believes that divine from the Deep South; more recently, Looking back now, Holley thinks intervention led him to the material Arnett’s son Matt who, after hearing the he’s created art since he can remember. that inspired his fi rst works. primal, spiritual blues on one of hundreds “Pretty much all my life I had been Within four months of making those of DIY cassettes Holley horded in his making things. From fi ve years old I was tombstone sculptures, he’d created more Alabama home, arranged to have the up and down the ditches and creeks as than 100 pieces. Encouraged by a friend, material released; and Atlanta-based part of my playtime. I didn’t really know he loaded his car with some works and documentarian George King who, for what I was doing, or understand it. But took them to the Birmingham Museum 18 years, has followed the creative I would stack up rocks and take glass and of Art. Then director Richard Murray endeavours of a man whose art was born things and put them together. Just the loved both the art and the words Holley from a life of hardship and resilience. debris, the trash people didn’t want.” used to describe it. He showed photos of His artistic path began in tragedy. “I Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the pieces, including Time and Baby started with art when I made sandstone 1950, Holley was seventh of 27 children. Being Born, to a Smithsonian curator, sculptures as tombstones for my sister’s He was taken from his mother at the age and Holley got his fi rst big break. Over children,” he tells me over the phone of two. At age seven, living with a family the next decade, he made thousands of while on tour in New York. It was 1979 called the McElroys, he was hit by a car small and large-scale works, creating a when his niece and nephew were killed and spent three months in a coma. When junk art yard stretching for two acres in a house fi re. He was 29. “We didn’t he recovered, he ran away to look for his behind his family’s property. Rusted oil > 134 135 CINEMA | Lonnie Holley Dish of the Receiver, 1983 Defense, 1997 In Bed with Him (The Old Man and the Young Girl), 1995 drums splattered with luminous paint, he found confirmed what Arnett had of these artists.” Many would feature plastic flowers, animal bones, burned- suspected. “Lonnie was the first artist I in two volumes of Souls Grown Deep: out TVs, twisted metal pipes, old door met who was doing things I knew were African-American Vernacular Art of the frames and slashed tyres, mixed up to done traditionally all over the South, in South. “There was all these people who’d living. We try to rid ourselves of it but drainage and water pollution close up. creating junk art yards. Joe Minter made create a wild but magical installation. yards, out of sight. It was totally hidden. been ignored,” says Holley. “Travelling throw it no further than the trash site. He’s very knowledgeable, passionate his African Village junk-sculpture park “This Art Works from the Spirits” and I started looking deeper and I found it with Bill gave me the chance to meet You know what I’m saying? We try to about global warming and recycling and in Alabama as a tribute to the ongoing “The Times is Here” read signs tangled everywhere there was a black population. these artists and help them. They were bury it but it will always re-expose itself. revaluing things. The thing he is also civil-rights struggle. At one time, such up amongst the junk art and sandstone not only struggling to put food on the Heavier materials – like stone, concrete really interested in is how those materials African-American yard art could be sculptures. One of is visitors was George table but with what they were doing. with steel – don’t degrade, they just lie are affected by the world and by time.” found on a smaller scale across the South. King. “I went over there with a view to Many didn’t know what art was.” there and over time Mother Earth does Recycling is also central to the work Holley forages anywhere for including him in a film I had thought of ‘PRETTY The work Holley creates is part of a her thing. I’m like an archaeologist, a of Thornton Dial. Best known for his material: construction sites, woods, making on the outsider art movement,” great tradition of recycling in African- humanitarian, and an inspector of how mixed-media assemblages, his abstract- gutters and landfills. In works he has he recalls. “But once I had met Lonnie MUCH ALL American art from the South. “Things humans build. I got a chance to not only expressionism has drawn comparisons to displayed at galleries you’ll find steel it was like, ‘Why look any further?’ people threw away or found. That’s how find out how things are made but also Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. piping, broken chairs, shards of concrete Suddenly I realised I was making the MY LIFE I HAD all this found-object thing materialised,” about their endurance. I’ve never been The late Purvis Young is also known and glass, shoes and kitchen utensils, all wrong film. That’s what happened. I BEEN MAKING says William Arnett. “A piece of found to the pyramids but I could have a good among these artists. His Paintings from pieced together to create both figurative started filming Lonnie.” Another wood or machinery was used to make a discussion with professors in that field the Street used rough, uneven discarded and abstract imagery. Twisted roles of important visitor was William Arnett. THINGS’ sculpture because that’s all they had; on about deteriorating factors.” materials like scrap wood and cardboard electrical wire become curly locks of hair “When I finally found him, it was the other hand, they attributed meaning King has watched Lonnie develop a as a canvas for his painterly depictions of in No Place to Hide After Your Mother Has like a fan of the 15th century walking and symbolism to these things.” Arnett close understanding of the environment ghetto life and black history. There are You, while Along the Rails, an assemblage into the cathedral at Ghent for the first Finding Lonnie Holley was like a magic has traced these traditions of using found he works in over the years. “He’s always many others: Ralph Griffin, known for of wood and iron shards with coloured time and seeing the work of Van Eyck. wand that opened my eyes.” objects back to slavery. “Most of it began been fascinated with what’s around him,” his beautiful tree-root sculptures; the late paper, is suggestive of the blues. But It was like that, a real ‘eureka’ moment,” Holley helped Arnett in his search. in cemeteries,” he says. “They made little he says. “What’s around him is usually Nellie Mae Rowe, who made dolls from whether figurative or something more Arnett says. “I had started looking in the They travelled the South to uncover a monuments out of found materials and trash, streams nobody cares about, the fabric scraps, chewing gum and marbles; obscure, Holley’s work features political South for some visual art tradition that hidden chapter in art history. “He created a whole form of art that was ditches. It’s an urban environment, those or Ronald Lockett, the youngest, who and autobiographical observations on our hadn’t come to light. I was finding some became a partner in this,” says Arnett. symbolic and metaphoric.” little corners where a tree is trying to died of AIDS-related pneumonia in relationship to nature and technology. known folk artists but it wasn’t what I “We went around Alabama, Georgia, Holley’s use of found objects carries grow.