Umberger Something to take my Place the art of Lonnie Holley EditEd by Mark Sloan Essays by Bernard L. Herman Theodore Rosengarten Mark Sloan Leslie Umberger Halsey InstItute of Contemporary art College of CHarleston, sCHool of tHe arts CHarleston, soutH CarolIna 2 Umberger in Memory of the blood Leslie Umberger L onnie Bradley Holley became a gleaner around executed. They are memory vessels, pacts of survival, and the age of five. His quarry was the debris of meditations on the dualities of the human sphere. His humanity, things left in the wake of the fortunate works are protective talismans that both collectively and and the careless. Being a salvager, keeping his eyes to the singularly speak of governing fates—the accidents of place, ground for the unrecognized wealth that might lie before time, materiality, and interactions that overarchingly mirror him, became one of Holley’s most defining characteristics. those of humanity. Since he began making art in 1979, his This trait, born of both physical need and spiritual pieces have functioned as parts of a malleable mosaic; he salvation, would lastingly guide and govern both Holley’s is both environment builder and maker of discreet works life and his art. of art, a shapeshifting carver, bricoleur, painter, storyteller, Holley’s youth was caught in the crossfire of a Jim poet, and singer, whose most constant state is one of motion. Crow South and a Civil Rights-era America. He was born Comprehensively, Holley’s works of art comprise a charged in 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama. Holley inherited the chronicle of his entire life, each piece a potent mnemonic struggles and animosities that began centuries before he container of oral history that springs to life when looked was born, and his boyhood was snared in an ideological at, touched, or talked about. Most specifically in this way, battle that would permanently stain Alabama’s historical Holley’s work is inseparable from the vernacular milieu that identity. Today, Holley is among America’s most highly shaped it. Like many traditional practices and folkways, regarded artists, featured in a host of exhibitions that his work functions to keep people alive in his memory and include a twenty-five-year retrospective at the Birmingham map his own existence in relation to theirs. It is deeply Museum of Art in 2004, this major solo exhibition at autobiographical, but encompasses other planes—the the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and group conjoined stories of African Americans and all people born shows around the world, most recently the 2014 Prospect into legacies of struggle and oppression; personal history New Orleans. He has works of art in premier museum as American history. In the context of the greater art world, collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Holley’s forms can be discussed in terms of their conceptual Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and The sophistication and abstract grace, their contemplation of Metropolitan Museum of Art. Holley’s sculptural forms urban wreckage and agrarian bounty, their call for harmony and elaborated spaces are powerfully personal, nimble in and morality, and a relentless juxtaposition of the world’s form and strategy, heartfelt, and deeply rooted. In works horrors and wonders. that are simultaneously diaphanous and unyielding, he Holley gravitates toward degraded castoffs and their braids together personal experience, family stories, cultural palpable narrative of challenge and endurance. His survivals, the gravity of history, and the ephemeral sublime. aesthetic is very deeply imprinted, not chosen as a fashion Holley’s working method is largely extemporaneous, or in conscious opposition to the polish of mainstream his multimedia pieces are tangible expressions of active gleam; it is the stuff from which he is made. To say that thought rather than something rigidly planned and Holley had a hard childhood doesn’t scratch the surface; 10 11 Umberger in Memory of the blood to estimate the ways in which it both branded and shaped provide comprehensive context for Holley’s worldview and been before, in which the prevailing treatment of African dominance. In Slavery by Another Name, Douglas A. him, truly impossible. What is possible is to say that while the work that stems from it. Here, only some of the key American artists finally revealed the depth and profundity Blackmon argues that de facto slavery did not end nearly as much of Holley’s inheritance has been that of pain and loss, facts are reiterated—those that bear revisiting regularly, for of the racial tensions that underlay the art. To celebrate the long ago as many Americans believe. Blackmon’s Pulitzer he has consistently spun his challenges into an array of Holley himself will never have much distance from them, as work of a “naïve” or “primitive” artist, through the filters Prize–winning book charts an era between the Civil War profound heirlooms and poetic jewels; to detach the roots his visual art, poetic dialogues, and improvisational music of Western art, had been one thing, to honor a black artist and the Civil Rights movement, when more than a hundred from the fruits would undermine the power of his endeavor. all attest. as having an original and intentional aesthetic, and being thousand random African American citizens, including Yet, the close proximity of his biography to his content does Regarding the output of artists, self-taught artists in on par with, or even superior to, any other artist, entirely children, were arrested on false or invented charges. When not confine or define him, and the aesthetic power of his particular, the role and relative import of biography is often another. they could not pay bail, they were subsequently sold or work is undeniable. As artists of all kinds routinely make debated. And not unjustly, because, in the early days of “leased” to labor camps designed around free labor and manifest, the cultural and visual environments of our lives such art even being discussed at all, the biographies of the 1800s in the 1970s black suppression and run by major American corporations, become integral to who we are; those suffusing realities nonart-world artists were disproportionately foregrounded— In his 1974 book All God’s Dangers, Theodore Rosengarten small-scale entrepreneurs, farmers, and state and county shape aesthetic sensibilities and engender affinities. In the exoticized in a mixed-motive attempt to justify, interpret, chronicles the memories of an Alabama sharecropper. The governments. Klan terrorism was periodic, but these mid-1950s, peaceful protests and acts of civil disobedience, and market work that did not subscribe to established and man, using the pseudonym Nate Shaw, gives a sobering other practices were routine and widespread. Blackmon’s comprising the nascent Civil Rights movement, began to understood (white/Western) models. What constitutes “early account of a poor, black tenant-farmer’s life “under the twin research centered, in particular, around steel mines in the provoke harsh backlash, perhaps most of all in Alabama and days,” for the purpose of this essay, are the 1980s and ‘90s, yoke of race oppression and economic peonage.”2 About Birmingham area. He writes: Mississippi. As a child adrift and unprotected, Holley would when the work of Southern, vernacular artists, particularly him, Rosengarten writes: “Shaw demonstrates that a person It was a form of bondage distinctly different not participate in or benefit from the battles for rights and African Americans, saw a marked rise in popularity. is, at every moment, everything he always was; his current from that of the antebellum South. . . . But it was equality until his formative years had long since passed. In a broader view, playing up the personal characters role can eclipse his past but not deny it.”3 Holley embodies nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies The world we find ourselves in is not always spiritually of untrained artists in the United States dates farther back, this same sentiment; his affable nature and ease with an of men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law or sensually sufficient, and artists who build or artistically to the 1930s and ‘40s, when the stone carver William artistic celebrity and with any group of people never fully to freedom, were compelled to labor without elaborate an environment are often addressing a need to Edmondson became the first African American artist to veil the life that came before the one he lives today. compensation, were repeatedly bought and remake it, reshape, at the very least, a corner of it. Aesthetic receive a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and Shaw predates Holley by some fifty years, and describes sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white imprinting or affiliation does not pertain to race or ethnicity such so-called “primitives” as Edmondson, Grandma (Anna not just his own life but the memories passed to him orally masters through the application of extraordinary so specifically as it does to lived experience and cultural Mary Robertson) Moses, Horace Pippin, John Kane, and by his forebears. New York Times book reviewer Dwight physical coercion.5 heritage. To the extent that many Southern, vernacular Morris Hirshfield all first received acclaim—albeit through Garner notes that “All God’s Dangers also happens to be Antebellum and postwar eras are, of course, distinct, African American artists respond visually and emotionally a modernist lens. In different ways, untrained artists in a dense catalogue of the ways that whites tricked and but the legacy handed by the former to the latter is to objects that have traveled a hard road or embody, the early, mid- and late twentieth centuries were distanced mistreated blacks in the first half of the twentieth century.”4 indelible and lasting. What becomes particularly relevant materially or metaphorically, the place they come from, it is from the mainstream, and their noticeable variances (such And, indeed, what may be most striking today is how the here is that, as mainstream museums increasingly show an affinity both poignant and logical. In this volume, Holley as rural backgrounds, lack of education, or various degrees American collective memory acknowledges the horrors of and collect African American vernacular art, they often conveys his epic personal journey through National Book of mental or cultural difference) were used to arouse slavery but largely suppresses those of the ensuing one follow a trending curatorial model of detaching the art Award-winner and MacArthur Fellow Theodore Rosengarten enthusiasm for creations that didn’t play by art-world rules. hundred years, when aggressive oppression continued from the harsh realities that shaped it. This stems in part and his story will be told in the forthcoming biographic film Yet, it is the latter of these periods, when nativist modes and even thrived among a contingent of America that from conflating vernacular art with the work of professional The Lonnie Holley Story, by George King.1 Both explorations of production became visible in a way they had never was unwilling to concede defeat in the battle for racial African American artists who not unjustly wanted to be 12 13 Umberger in Memory of the blood regarded as Americans beyond their collective racial past, Holley called her, ran an establishment that was no place Pulling on the Root get there, Holley had to crawl through a drainage pipe that bewildered boy. In a rush to be out of the house, Lonnie intellectuals of talent, skill, and worth. But those aims are for kids; it was all adults, drinking. She was nice, he 1994 connected the properties. He recalls: “I crawled through stepped into the street without looking. When the car hit 27 ½ x 26 x 24 not one and the same with the artists who never had the recalls, but her husband was not. photograph by steve pitkin / those pipes, down in the muck that was in them. It was him, it dragged Holley’s small frame under the front fender opportunity to move into educated middle- or upper-class Holley was given the backyard to hang out in, not a pitkin studios dark; I learned where to put my hands and feet, learned for blocks. The driver claimed not to have noticed the body realms. Curatorial partitioning between art and cultural real yard so much as a small dirt patch behind the house. to understand touch, feel, sounds. It was survival through he hit head-on.9 Holley’s legs and arms were all broken, history reveals, perhaps most of all, an overcorrection of The alternative was to go look for work at the drive-in, physical experience.”7 skull fractured. He remained in a coma for several months the biography-emphasizing age of the exotic “outsider where the manager hired the small boy to pick up trash. To Holley learned that, along with the garbage people threw and surprised all by living. artist” and an institutional anxiety about delving into away, they also tossed things of value. Careless folks at the Holley got into a predictable spate of troubles for aesthetics that are borne of discomfiting circumstances and drive-in sometimes discarded change with their snack bar kids with nowhere but the streets to hang out. In 1961, provoke heated prevailing controversies. This cool ideal of refuse and people dropped or left behind personal items, so he was sent to a juvenile detention center called Mt. presenting an even playing field in the museum environment he learned to look carefully at what he was collecting and Meigs, otherwise known as the Alabama Industrial School suggests that such a field is, by simultaneous declaration keep anything of potential worth. Holley didn’t play, know for Negro Children. It was, ostensibly, a reform school and miracle, suddenly even. But the most salient fact is this: fun, feel safe, or experience much in the way of familial where black youth were trained in farming, but, as former The standards and ideals of the mainstream art world are love; he cut his teeth on the harsh reality of poverty and the Montgomery County probation officer Denny Abbott attests, irrelevant to this work; its power grew apart from them and poetry of trash. This visual environment allowed him to see it was “a slave camp.” Abbott writes: will exist apart from them, with or without endorsement. The many objects as inherently beautiful, though—forlorn and I want to make it clear that I’m not using mainstream art world, after underestimating this work for misunderstood or undervalued treasures with real gleam ‘slave’ as a figure of speech, and I’m not decades, is now caught in an awkward game of catch-up. beneath the tarnish. He thought about how a certain item exaggerating for dramatic effect. I’m talking In his sculpture, Holley has memorialized those who had passed from hand to hand to hand in its time of being. about a place where children as young as twelve underestimated or disrespected him along with those he His prize possession was a little red wagon. The positive were held by brute force and put into hard owes respect and gratitude. He speaks frequently about his memories he has of that fleeting childhood was taking his labor in the fields. They were worked until they family, childhood, and all the things that bloomed into his wagon around, rescuing tossed-aside treasures. He reflects dropped, and when they dropped they were artistic practice; he honors the journey that brought him on the roots of his aesthetic sensibilities, and indeed a beaten with sticks. Often they were beaten for no where he stands today, hard as it was. With six children philosophy that has become his mantra: “That was ugly, reason at all, and sometimes they were forced to preceding Lonnie, Dorothy Mae Holley Crawford (Dot) ugly was what we had. So, I thought, make it as beautiful as have sex with the men who beat them. The most enlisted the nursing help of a woman, who stole her child possible.”8 horrifying fact about this place is that it was run away. When this woman brought the little boy back to In Pulling on the Root (1994), Holley commemorates the by the State of Alabama.10 Birmingham, malnourished and unmoored at the age of four, red wagon, which, after being hit by a car while pulling it, he Holley’s years at Mt. Meigs are a story unto themselves. she traded him to the owner of a whiskey house.6 Holley never saw again. This was Birmingham in 1957, and Holley Suffice to say here that it was brutal; he was lucky to speaks of his time at this place as pivotal, roughly two had protection neither at home nor in the larger world. Mrs. survive.11 years between the ages of five and seven. Mrs. McElroy’s McElroy, bedridden and in ill health, had passed away. Holley’s paternal grandmother, Hixie Jones Canady house was situated among the Alabama State Fairgrounds, The woman’s husband blamed the child, whom he had left (called Momo) took him away from Mt. Meigs when he was a racetrack, and a drive-in movie theater. Big Mama, as alone to care for her for days on end, and beat the already fourteen. Holley’s father, A. J. Bradley, had died and he 14 15 Umberger in Memory of the blood went to live with Momo and his Uncle Jesse. His mother, care, and not all who are born survive. Holley describes Carrier of the seeds the family could not afford the expense of commercially Dot, lived nearby, with a new partner and her father, Willie Dot as capable and proud; they didn’t have much, but 2006 engraved stones. His sister’s grief inspired a vision in which 22 ½ x 9 ½ x 11 Holley. Lonnie was reunited with them and all the siblings she showed them they could live through thrift and hard Holley saw the spiritual rewards of creating the very most and cousins he had never known—a wealth of family work. These values encompassed him from all sides. with the very least, and imagined himself making a yard revealed in the span of a few months. Momo taught him Willie Holley, who was a World War I veteran and skilled filled with art.13 Using castoff chunks of industrial sand, how to comb local dumpsites for items they could sell at the craftsman, had built the house they shared on Airport Hill. he carved the memorial pieces, and after that began to flea market, and this lifestyle felt comfortable. All in the The adjacent land would one day anchor Holley’s yard paint, sculpt, and transform his yard into an art-filled space family knew how to scrape together, recycle, make do; they installation. around the clock. He thought about all the people who spun life out of straw. But Holley also recalls being restless Holley wanted to teach his brothers and sisters the were dead but not forgotten—objects and their relationship and lost. The abuses he had suffered made relationships value of thrift, salvage, and the various means of survival to those who had made or used them. “I dig through what challenging; he says he felt the love, but didn't really even he had learned over the years. He was also trying to teach other people have thrown away,” Holley said. “To get to the know what love was. His uncle told him to stay busy, but he them the value of education, but the era was shifting to one gold of it—to know that grandmother stood over that heat was finding trouble. His grandmother and mother sent him in which such social programs as welfare and food stamps preparing that meal, so when I go home with that skillet, to Florida to stay with a brother, and it was there that Holley were arguably helping and hurting. People were provided I’ve got grandmother. ‘Grand’: someone who has authority felt independent for the first time. He worked as a cook at a for, but the impetus to scrounge, save, and repurpose and is capable.”14 He increasingly saw every single thing Disney World motel in Orlando, and then picked tomatoes that Holley had been weaned on was becoming less around him as a container of symbolism, meaning, gifts in Ohio for Campbell’s Soup Company before going back to meaningful—a situation he viewed as both depressing bearing lessons. In 1993, Holley described himself as “a Florida. But somehow it didn’t come together; he felt aware and alarming. giant spider for life,” snaring all manner of detritus and of his failures at being a boyfriend and, by then, a father working with a fervor. “The web is my environment.”15 himself too. In 1971, he returned to Birmingham. One square acre of art By the time Holley moved to Harpersville, he was He saw the lives of his family differently than he had I first met Holley in 1997, just before his home and art a man accustomed to being stripped of everything in right after Mt. Meigs. The reality of their circumstances environment, near the Birmingham airport, were razed the process of beginning yet again. Recycling and the was a shock. He recalls, “My mama and them were living through the airport’s claim of eminent domain. Holley reclamation/salvation of trash treasures were integral to in the 1800s, with slop jars and outdoor bathrooms, and had already been displaced from the property, and was his practice and the way in which every single rescue of a no running water, and pigs in the house, and chickens trying to rescue as many individual pieces as possible. discarded bottle, lost doll head, tangle of wire, tree branch, and things in the backyard, and ducks and things roosting My conversations with Holley, at the time, were centered or fragment of consumer culture was, for Holley, an ongoing in the house. So I had thought, ‘What’s wrong?’ Here, in around the loss of his art environment, the beginnings self-affirmation and incessant ritual of a person who, 1972, I found my mother living in an 1800-kennel setting of a new one in Harpersville, Alabama—where he had himself, had been “thrown away” too many times. in the 1970s. It was kind of hard for me to deal with.”12 relocated—and how he had come to art-making initially, At that very transitional point in his life, Holley Holley says his mother was a powerful woman who bore a story that began with his reintegration into his natal was an artist who had remade his world in the manner of twenty-seven children, something he frames in relation family and negotiating the ensuing depression. The pivotal art-environment builders and yard-show makers. He had to sharecropping families, where a never-ending chain of moment was the tragic loss of two of his sister’s children created a protective home in the way of practitioners of family members contribute to all manner of work and family in a house fire and his creation of grave markers when conjure or root medicine—African folkways that strive for 16 17 Umberger in Memory of the blood balance in a chaotic world—that had survived and morphed Locking back fight for the rights of art. I have been to many places. I have after seeing his yard environment in the mid-1980s and since the first days of the Middle Passage. Keith Cartwright the Power understood that our kind of art, the art of black people, has grasping the depth of his vision. In 1981, Holley had been 2003 notes that the first generations of African Americans were 14 ½ x 15 x 9 been the first to come and is always the first to go. When our included in a group show, More Than Land or Sky, at the born into “a peculiarly homicidal and broken time-space”; art is too strong, it get tore down. If it is weak, there is even Smithsonian American Art Museum, and, in 1987, Voices they reinvented the world day by day and were “among people who will nurture it until it is strong and then tear it in the Wilderness, at the Birmingham Museum of Art.21 He the first orphan initiates and self-conscious subjects of a down.”19 gained entry to those museums, arguably, with greater ease globalizing modernity.” He observes that to be native to this By then, Holley was receiving recognition for his work, than a white artist of no record could have done, but the shattered reality is “to retain awareness of the violent and but still in a clearly marginalized way. In Harpersville, a contexts were heavily themed and regionalized, shaped shadow-haunted side of the sacred.”16 Ancestrally linked contentious relationship developed with neighbors who according to a then-forming outsider or contemporary folk and similarly native to a broken “time-space,” Holley has thought his nascent site an eyesore. The property itself art model. These were explorative ways of broadening the said that “life and death is a twin; they have to be.”17 was fraught; seized in a drug raid, the house was nestled scope of museum narratives that were inherently shaped Holley had dug graves with his grandmother and among an enclave of its former owner’s relatives. They were on exclusion and privilege. Self-taught African American observed the grave-marking practices of black Alabamans, openly hostile to an outsider—increasingly more so after artists had slid through the gates from time to time and which were often driven, at least in part, by financial he began to alter the site radically. Blacks in the area were for various reasons, such as “accidental” sophistication, means, and often utilized natural materials that degraded variously resentful of Holley’s reclamation and reinvention as was the case with William Edmondson and Bill over time like fading memories. He had lived near an of that space, and many white visitors could not see past Traylor, or for being overtly crude, as with such artists African American cemetery and seen how belongings a veneer of squalor or the uneasy aesthetic of discord and as William Hawkins and Mose Tolliver. Some trained of the deceased and found objects laden with metaphor mutability. Artist and professor Judith McWillie called African American artists viewed such inclusions not as an and metonymy became protective talismans, shelters for Holley’s installation “a locus of ‘moving equilibrium’ where advance for their race but as a problematic issue, wherein displaced gods, portals of remembrance—and how the physical coordinates constantly shift,” noting that a moving the white establishment had found an effective vehicle for meaning of those visual practices rang as clear as a bell equilibrium was an integral component of African divination diversification that deftly posed black artists as primitive centuries down the road. Unburdened by self-doubt, he systems. She continues, “Whereas Robert Rauschenberg’s and guileless. They felt undermined by the celebration accepted the role fate had seemingly handed him, that combines seem dependent on gestures magnetized to a of their untrained brethren, even though the art was often of global modern artist, seer, and healer. Holley had cryptic grid, Holley’s moves tend to break loose from the brilliantly original and powerful. Market tactics played into discovered that he walked a road in lockstep with his ground that would support them. The state-free status this hand. Self-taught artists were compartmentalized as forebears, and the revelation of redoubling histories had Phoenix versus Arsonist. As Holley kept rising, they kept of his art, its liminality, identifies it as divinatory rather outsiders, a container that coded a lack of sophistication. given him power. burning. Every one of his destroyed artworks provided than manneristic. Closure is in the eye of the beholder— The artists were not simply untrained, they were poor and The destruction of Holley’s acre of art was pivotal. him with materials, ideas, and incentives for new ones.”18 scattered, elusive, barely familiar, like listening to Gullah for uneducated, marginalized on a number of fronts, and these It was not a benign dismantling, it was more like a war Holley noted he worked like a yo-yo; the bulldozers tore the first time.”20 points were unfairly and erroneously used to explain a raw between the powers that be and a renegade spirit they felt things down, new works went up in their place. “I was By then, Holley had caught the attention of a few energy or tattered aesthetic. needed quashing. The bulldozers would veer off course trying to make art to protect the art,” he reflects. “I saw that collectors, academics, and curators. But his foremost Holley’s work was being collected, but his practice to destroy Holley’s site-specific assemblages. Atlanta arts in the city of Birmingham, where art could be tore down advocate was Arnett, who brought his art to a broader was intensely personal. He didn’t cater—then or at patron and advocate William Arnett recounted, “Imagine so easy and trampled upon, it was my responsibility to public and remained his most ardent champion, particularly any other time—to any market or fashion; “I’m not one 18 19 Umberger in Memory of the blood of those art fair cats,” he says.22 Those who visited his Hampton, Tressa (Grandma) Prisbrey, Sam Rodia (called supported by the Power balance, and personal vision. Moreover, the distinctions sculptural environment were alternately enthralled or off- Simon in their edition), Herman Rusch, Clarence Schmidt, 2003 between art environments made by European Americans 72 x 42 x 32 put; the visually percussive space was disorienting even Fred Smith, and Louis C. Wippich. and African Americans were emerging as indisputable to a set familiar with artistically elaborated spaces. The The work of James Hampton, the only African and important, and with those distinctions came a clearer phenomenon of art environments was becoming more widely American artist in the group, was first seen at the measure of all such places as valid containers of various, known—these being sites by artists who transformed a Smithsonian American Art Museum, in 1971.24 The specific cultural histories and evolutions—not merely personal space into a physical extension of personal being. artist had devoted decades to making a large-scale idiosyncratic oddities.26 But the sites that garnered the most attention (positive installation inside a rented carriage house in Washington, Holley’s installation was not about “visitor and negative) tended to be those that were big, bright, D.C., a devotional array he called The Throne of Third experience,” it was not fun or funny. The place functioned noticeable, or scintillatingly eccentric, such as Sabato Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. The comprehensively as a gateway into another state of mind; it (Sam) Rodia’s spiraling towers, in Los Angeles’s Watts,23 or Smithsonian’s acquisition of the 180-component piece was was a navigational apparatus in a larger world that Holley Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, in Summerville, Georgia. remarkable at the time: a sizeable conglomeration of found had experienced as unbalanced and unpredictable. His Rodia battled naysayers for the duration of his project, and and fragile elements embellished with texts in English space was one that provoked existential ruminations on was dead by the time his site became an attraction. Finster’s and in an arcane script, made by an untrained, unknown, being part of a capitalist consumer culture—a continuum passionate evangelism and visual articulation were widely African American artist that in no discernible way fit into between the era of greed-driven slavery and today’s regarded as integral to the site itself. His art was valued for an established mainstream art narrative. But the piece engulfing landfills and planetary abuses. The past, both its inventiveness and originality, and visitors respected the demanded attention. It was identifiably religious in nature, that which Holley had experienced and one he could only tremendous dedication his project required—but many also overtly Christian, but there was clearly more to it—from imagine, had shaped him into a person of serious reflection. saw the artist as a colorful character who was fun to visit, the start, it was referred to as a work of “visionary art.” He had embarked upon a relentless quest to respect his and the site was often experienced akin to an amusement In 1983, Robert Farris Thompson, historian of African ancestors, keep their story alive, and use his own existence park. One could step into that world for a few hours of and African American art at Yale, proposed connectivity and practice toward a positive outgrowth of endurance. amazement and return unscathed to everyday life. between African spiritual traditions and African American “We bring the story forward.”27 Rodia (1879–1965) and Finster (1916–2001) both visual practices, linking Hampton’s entrancing piece to predate Holley significantly, but their environments were Kongo incarnations of “flash and poetic flight.”25 Thompson souls Grown deep among those that, while radically different, helped shape meant not to undermine the Americanness of such work In 1996, Holley had been among a group of artists chosen an American sense of what constituted an art environment. but to illuminate the idea of ancestral legacy in practices to highlight what was by then being called a strong and Gregg Blasdel described the phenomenon in his 1968 that had largely been viewed through a Western lens as serious vein of Southern African American vernacular Art in America article “The Grass Roots Artist.” And he haphazard, unimportant, and unsightly. art in an exhibition called Souls Grown Deep, organized was among the authors of the catalogue for the first major Hampton’s array, ordered and symmetrical, is to showcase Southern art and culture during the 1996 exhibition on the art of environment builders at the Walker superficially the opposite of Holley’s eclectic labyrinth, Summer Olympics. The High Museum had set its sights Art Center, in Minneapolis, in 1974: Naïves and Visionaries. and yet the greater inquiry into art environments would on making Atlanta seem worldly rather than celebrating That exhibition called attention to the “visionary ultimately shed light on the commonalities of practices that anything homegrown, and J. Carter Brown, then director environments” of artists Samuel Perry Dinsmoore, James entailed self-reclamation, cultural rootedness, spiritual emeritus at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, 20 21 Umberger in Memory of the blood organized the exhibition Rings: Five Passions in World Art. boneheaded serpent seemed intent on getting the Souls Grown Deep show driven In Slave Ship (1984), Holley encapsulates a seminal Crowds swarmed, critics groaned. Roberta Smith of the at the Cross into the ground. Her worldview was so dramatically different history. As he is so deftly able to, he speaks volumes with 1996 New York Times wrote, “Blockbuster art exhibitions often 21 x 18 x 9 from Holley’s that she could not see his charged space as relatively few elements. The ship itself is composed of excel at superficiality, but Rings: Five Passions in World Art, art at all, and her limited artistic vision precluded even wreckage, lives in ruins—both of those on the ship and which opens on July 4 at the High Museum of Art, deserves tolerance. Holley remarked, “Our work on the Olympics was family left behind on African shores. But its northbound a special award. The centerpiece of the cultural events because of years of effort from many minds. But the persons bowsprit indicates an unstoppable motion and an surrounding the summer Olympic Games, the exhibition between the art and its place in history didn’t appreciate unchangeable destiny. The splintered wooden palette may set records for the most international art treasures space, described by Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones, Jr., as or want to see the beauty in the art. So, like a serpent, they serving as the hull evokes the cruel plank beds the traveling the greatest distances for the least curatorial “a front yard re-created right down to the dirt floor, but a poisoned the respect for the art. Intentionally.”31 enslaved were chained onto, prone and stacked like the purpose.”28 yard transformed, with broken tombstones, sprinkler heads, trade goods they were regarded as. When the High had settled on featuring “world bedsprings, paintings, baby-doll parts—and all of it rejiggered an artist of Enduring Legacy In Holley’s sculpture, a bent and ravaged piece of class art” rather than the region’s native culture, Holley by artist Lonnie Holley into a phantasmagorical vision as The Souls Grown Deep project became more than the sheet metal serving as the sail conjures J. M. W. Turner’s made an assemblage called Not Olympic Rings (1994). surreptitiously coherent as a dream.”29 exhibition. Major volumes ensued that documented African painting Slave Ship (1840), in which the cargo ship In it, he ruminated on then-recent encounters with local Of the exhibition comprehensively, Jones said, “The American vernacular art and yard work integrally and navigates harsh waters, its red masts fusing into a red-sky authorities—from the city officials and bureaucrats at Sloss show that ought to be showcased in the High Museum, the comprehensively.32 In the first volume, Holley wrote, “This evening that signals an oncoming storm. The sea is roiling Furnace, who dismantled a public sculpture commissioned show that best exemplifies the South’s unique contribution to is very important: this book is going to allow us to see the red with the blood of the dead and dying being thrown by the Southern Arts Federation, to the powers that be at art, has been relegated to a lesser space in City Hall East, a shackles, and know that blood was spilled, but not get angry to the fishes, the entire scene a fury of rage and outrage. the High Museum and on the organizing committee for venue that’s harder to find but worth the trouble. Souls Grown about it. We will understand the value of these bloods, not Holley’s sail is tinged pink and red at the front, but the the Olympic events—all seemed hell-bent on trying to Deep, an enormous collection of vernacular art—what used only the blood of black Americans but every other human sunset hues move into a snarl of black graffiti, visceral undercut his artistry. With an armature that evokes Holley’s to be called primitive art—by Southern African-Americans body that has made contributions through the blood.”33 spatters, and blackness. Barbed wire, cruelly tangled, own facial profile, the piece is strung with various circular is the show to see in Atlanta.”30 The exhibition itself was an objects: car parts, dials, industrial O-rings, and rusted and early instance in Holley succeeding against the odds. With an worn castoffs from the industrial, agricultural, and urban aesthetic utterly foreign, and seemingly threatening, to some realm of African Americans in the South. Noting that the of the organizers, the project (retrospectively viewed by many piece is especially autobiographical, Holley explains that as seminal) was variously thwarted. They were moved to an the castoff rings stand in for him; they are not the glowing out-of-the-way space, support staff was withdrawn, and the art rings deemed appropriate for the world stage. was shrilly dressed-down in front of the artists as if they had The art for Souls Grown Deep had been recognized and not the wherewithal to understand what was being said. Like preserved by Arnett, and the exhibition was a collaborative other experiences entailing endurance and persistence, Holley effort among him, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic committed the event to memory with the sculpture Boneheaded Games (ACOG) Cultural Olympiad, the Carlos Museum Serpent at the Cross (It Wasn’t Luck) (1996), which ruminated of Emory University, and the City of Atlanta Bureau of on the misplaced righteousness of dominant cultures. In slave ship Cultural Affairs. Holley created a charged environmental particular, a white woman in the employ of the Carlos Museum 1984 43 x 103 x 48 22 23 Umberger in Memory of the blood brings snares and traps to mind; its brittle rustiness, along An extension of the idea of family, blood itself is Mama and Papa's blood in Memory of at the camp as well—a “whitewashed” story of what really with a nailed-on, pounded, element-ravaged piece of rusty another reoccurring metaphor in Holley’s work. Mama’s 2007 the blood (detail) happened in these places—a story that is only revealing the detail 2007 sheet metal, serves to reference both the salty sea air of and Papa’s Blood (2007) is a tribute that extends beyond detail depth of its horrors today. Drizzles of red paint connote an the Middle Passage and rural Alabama, where steel, iron, his own parents, encompassing his grandparents and their inhumane scene, the color of blood as fresh and bright as and railroading were major industries. The main mast, the parents and grandparents from time immemorial. The wire the artist’s memory of torture. structure to which all else clings, is an iron pipe, such as armature is bent to resemble a person kneeling in prayer, In Memory of the Blood is a more confrontational those sometimes seen in African American cemeteries, a the blood-soaked (painted) garment denotes both kinship piece than Rock Pile. Holley’s natural language is one vertical pipeline between realms: the suffocating hold and and suffering. “Him and her went out and struggled. The of abstraction, but in the past decade his confidence the open air, the dead and the living, earth and the heavens. same blood that had given you life, struggled and was in offering unmistakable messages has risen. Such art With Slave Ship, Holley proposes that we have to spilled on your behalf. Father went off to war. Mother historians as Farris-Thompson and Grey Gundaker have acknowledge the past in order to move forward and heal. worked her hands to the bone for you. The blood came long argued that African Americans brought with them This piece, in many ways, is emblematic of Holley himself, together for you. It honors life. Humanity and the making of from Africa visual strategies that bypassed spoken or never confrontational or gratuitous but always able to send humanity.”36 written language, and that these practices continued, a clear and penetrating message that relates, as Cartwright morphed, and evolved as white slave masters attempted to phrased it, “the shadow-haunted side of the sacred.” Sacred Holley sees blood as life, both literally and symbolically. thwart communication and destroy related groups toward encompasses a great deal for Holley, but those who went Conceptually representative of familial flesh and blood, it a more complete defeat and domination. Today, the study before him, family, both immediate and extended, is a also evokes a physically brutal chronicle that unites African of continuums and evolutions in visual practice (better revered theme that overarches his entire body of work. Americans beyond the realm of African heritage. Two understood in music) is increasingly widespread, and In Grandmama’s Bottomless Bucket (1999), Holley sculptures, Blood on the Rock Pile (2003) and In Memory of attempts to parse superlinguistic representations, or the life honors the matriarch, not just his own but all the women the Blood (2007), specifically take up the idea of blood in its of signs in society, are viewed with skepticism.37 Arguments he knew who fulfilled a central role for their families. “The more brutal evocations to recall Holley’s years at Mt. Meigs. that African Americans in the transatlantic South both bottomless buckets can’t hold anything but memories,” Blood on the Rock Pile memorializes one of Holley’s retained old world heritage and created a new and unique Holley explains. “So many of these old buckets were used harshest memories, a severe beating during his incarceration culture dovetails with Cartwright’s assertion that the first and wore out but kept around because they carried the that left him unable to walk for several months and his head generations were “among the first orphan initiates and special memories of the spirits that had used them . . . severely reinjured. Unable to work the fields or even to stand self-conscious subjects of a globalizing modernity.” They Those sacred memories stick with me.”34 The idea of the afterward, Holley was left to recover on an outdoor pile of were not exploring modernism as a lofty concept, they were bottomless bucket also harks back to Holley’s memories rocks along a main path. As he remembers it, he spent more shaping it in real time, in real actions, and in real objects of the hard times and the many mouths to feed. He speaks than a year laying on this pile of stones, his spilled blood left and images. Their art and music were not intellectual often of his grandmother’s ability to produce the things they to stain the whitewashed rocks and warn several hundred strivings but survival tactics on numerous fronts. needed—growing food, finding items to sell. The bucket other kids as they looked on. In the sculpture, wires tightly Arnett, too, has spoken at length about visual forms held nothing certain, yet somehow always contained what bind the concrete and stone fragments that abstractly suggest that transcend language, not as an artistic formula but they needed. Holley has explained: “Our family was very, a small person’s broken and constricted body. White paint through urgency and necessity. “The art, in order to survive, very rich, but we didn’t have no money.”35 poured from above suggests the blanketing white domination had to be disguised. It couldn’t be pictorial—[African 24 25 Umberger in Memory of the blood American artists] couldn’t paint a big picture of a black another definition of metal and nylon strapping, baling wire, and tree branches, and dull as the story fades; never rewound, never retold. man hanging and white people standing around laughing suffering the piece speaks softly of grieving and remembrance, while Holley often employs paper to broadly refer to records, 2006 about it.”38 Symbolism was key. “He’s totally abstract, and 55 ½ x 29 x 9 throwing out subliminal references to the countless African learning, and histories. He speaks often about the ways he’s been that way forever,” Holley’s adult son Kubra told Americans who went without proper burial or, worse, whose in which African Americans were blocked from anything a New York Times journalist in 2014. And, indeed, many of bodies were never left for kin to claim and cherish. It that would have allowed them to advance—receiving an Holley’s works are cryptic when taken alone, enormously denotes both the make-do necessity of bare-bones materials, education and equal rights above all else. When a people illuminated by his titles or autobiographical overlay, but the ability to make something from nothing, and the mixed can’t write their own history or read the words of others, always reluctant to reveal all their secrets. More recently, blessing of humbleness and invisibility—things overlooked they are utterly and effectively disempowered, a point of however, Holley seems more inclined to say some things by those who might destroy them, but also fated to rust and outrage for those who fought for civil rights. Memory Paper plainly, as is the case with In Memory of the Blood. flake away, splinter and soften in the wind and weather. shows a stack of decaying paper slumped on a wooden Like many of Holley’s sculptures, In Memory of These memorials, ultimately, won’t endure and persevere shipping pallet, weighted down by a piece of rusted metal, the Blood plots a narrative through symbolic parts, oral in the way of those in granite and bronze—those conferred both imprinting the stack and holding it down. “The paper tradition made manifest with materials and objects. The upon by the dominant culture as important and true. is going back to pulp,“ Holley notes. “I was thinking about wooden crutches that compose the central vertical element Holley does think in depth about how you shape and the newspaper print of the Civil Rights era and beyond, and are unambiguous in their message. These are not lightly symbolic, rife with meanings and layers that will reward the safekeep unmemorialized memories, rewrite a history that how much paper it would have taken to tell the whole story. worn walking aids, they are the battle-bloodied stand-in viewer in equal return of any investment. Holley’s use of was hijacked and presented only from the viewpoint of the The molten iron symbolizes the weight of the period. The legs of the barely living. Saturated with blood, they are roots—here and throughout his body of work—more subtly power structure. Cutting Up Old Film (Don’t Edit the Wrong pallet is what carry the load.”40 bound tightly to the rock—an ironic site, both prison and draws on the idea of root medicine, an old-world practice Thing Out) (1984), Memory Paper (2003), and Hiding the Completing this particular thematic flight, Hiding shelter for a broken body, symbolizing the pile of rocks on involving natural materials, poultices, and bundles to heal Records (2006) are among many pieces in which he explores the Records offers up a rope-bound binder bursting with which Holley was left to either die or heal. Found scraps and protect. Encompassing the bloodied root in this savage the idea of lost, erased, and distorted histories. Cutting Up documents. An iron base provides a strong and resilient of gray polyester and bits of gauze conjure dirty bandages; bundle proposes that a belief in higher powers and the Old Film is a particularly powerful piece, simple but potent. foundation, which Holley equates with the African sanitation and any nurturing for the wounded have no place internal knowledge of belonging to something ancient and An old film reel nestles all of its original footage; a vintage American workers who helped build America while whites in this scene. The brutality is both hard to look at and persisting may be what gets you through. paper leader reads “DO NOT REWIND AFTER SHOWING.” took all the credit and profits—true in the days of slavery, impossible to turn away from. Holley’s acts of commemoration can be both quiet Apropos of a white chronicle of American history, once a through the hundred years that Blackmon chronicles Looking closely at the bundled parts, a piece of blood- and vociferous, often simultaneously. Another Definition of story is told by the victors other versions rarely hold the between emancipation and civil rights, and from the era of soaked tree root, embedded in the tangle of rock, wood, Suffering (2006) takes the path of poetry over confrontation. same sway. A pair of scissors suspended from the center of civil rights through today. The records of what happened blood, and bandage, becomes increasingly evident. This is Of it, Holley says, “It’s like a cross. It is made of make- the reel provokes the question of editing: Who decides what and how tightly they are bound up are layered histories the symbolic root that Holley holds onto, his connection to do materials. It marks the site of a loved one’s death parts of the story get told and what falls away on the cutting- that Holley wants cracked open and brought to light. his family, his people, and his place in a legacy. Overtly, place.” Meaning to speak broadly about African American room floor? Those scissors may also allude to the desire “Thousands of humans could have worked for a factory or Holley employs a metonymic duality with tree roots and commemoration practices rather than a specific instance, to hold a device of control in one’s own hand—a pinnacle furnace, and when it came time to showcase the humans ancestral roots, a linguistic and visual intertwining that, he continues: “It wasn’t always a cross. Sometimes it was goal that one might actually tell her or his own story. Here, that had put forth the effort to help a city grow, you didn’t although powerful and important unto itself, also urges a just a stick. Or a rock. Something to remind the person of however, the potentially powerful tool is thwarted, confined see but a few faces.” Holley decries: “Most of the laborers larger truth: Every element of his artistic vein is deeply the location or the spot.”39 Made from aged fencing wood, to a position of disuse. Ineffectual and childlike, they rust and workers are forgotten.”41 26 27 Umberger in Memory of the blood Holley knows too well how much of the story never got and Freedom, in 1963. The son of sharecroppers, Lewis the multiple times the nonviolent Freedom Riders were work. Song may hold pain, but pain is not told, and one of his aims is to keep some of the lesser-known became interested in equal rights issues as a boy when mercilessly beaten yet remained resolute. “It was thirteen song.45 heroes in the fore. Steppin’ For You: The Walker (Honoring his family took a trip to Buffalo, New York, and he saw, for of us on the original ride—seven whites and six blacks,” Today, as America confronts its identity as a country John Lewis) (2004) and Changing My Walk (2004) pay the first time, black and white men working together and Lewis told a CNN interviewer in 2001. “The bus was burned founded on the ideals of freedom, democracy, and peace tribute to figures Holley means to keep philosophically unsegregated drinking fountains. It seemed to him then that in Anniston, Alabama. We were beaten in Birmingham, and but built on servitude, inequity, and violence, it must alive, both for those who remember their seminal roles and equality might, one day, actually become real. He became later met by an angry mob in Montgomery, where I was hit in take a sober look at the “walls” that indeed still stratify for younger people who might never otherwise come to know dedicated to nonviolent acts of protest, participating in the the head with a wooden crate. It was very violent. I thought I this society. In music, such original American forms the histories of those they honor. Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins and becoming one of the was going to die.”44 as blues and jazz are accepted as vital components of And the histories of both John Robert Lewis (b. 1940) original thirteen Freedom Riders. He helped organize the Paul Arnett, an art historian who cowrote and African American and American culture. They brought and Andrew Jackson Young (b. 1932), the honoree of voter registration efforts across the South that led to the edited the Souls Grown Deep books with his father, observes: key elements from Africa and the diaspora yet became Changing My Walk, are larger than life. Young has been Selma to Montgomery marches, and he was among those It is almost axiomatic that to be born black unique and distinct in this country. African American a pastor, activist, congressman, diplomat, and the mayor beaten by Alabama state troopers on March 7, 1965, the into a certain social class in the Deep South visual forms, as old as their musical parallels but often of Atlanta. A legendary Georgian in his own right, he day that became known as Bloody Sunday.43 means confronting hardship—what [the artist] more overtly challenging, have been far more commonly was friend and colleague to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Steppin’ for You: The Walker resembles a totem; Thornton Dial calls “the fences of the United ignored, denied, or celebrated only when perceived as was with him in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was humanlike in stature, it stands tall. The shoes nailed to States” and what Andrew Young refers to as innocuous. Young himself observes, “It is the silent, assassinated. He worked as a strategist and negotiator in the either side of the figure are not just well worn, they are “life behind the wall.” It is often difficult to read stationary, visual arts that have been perhaps the most civil rights campaigns that resulted in the Civil Rights Act thoroughly beaten up. The old tin roofing tiles sheathing the biographies of many of these artists without politically and existentially dangerous form of personal of 1964. Young has been widely recognized as an advocate the central wooden railroad tie comprise the thick skin one succumbing to feelings of searing empathy. Such expression for African Americans living in an unbalanced for peace, something Holley recognizes in Changing My needed to face the angry mobs that awaited the Freedom responses are neither right nor wrong, but they society.” Walk, with a black shoe and a white shoe paired side by Riders. The upper tile, the face of the abstracted figure, can distract from the more complicated, holistic Hard conversations are embodied in Holley’s side atop a chair. “The chair holds two shoes,” Holley is blood red—dried, but not shying away—referencing calls for action and appreciation located in this indomitable piece Table of Discussion (2005). Using the explains. “A small, white shoe and a large, black shoe. legs and rails of a dinner table as its base, the sculpture The black shoe looks well-worn, but the white shoe looks invites approach. Holley describes the assemblage as one preserved. I put both shoes on the same level to show the that takes a thematic page from Leonardo da Vinci’s The equality we were searching for. Black, white, male, female, Last Supper, an iconic historical work about the sharing of laborer, thinker; the shoe wearer will one day be equal in food as a sacred communal and familial tradition, but also the eyes of humanity.”42 about such gatherings as places of inherent danger—less Steppin’ For You: The Walker (Honoring John Lewis) specifically about betrayal than about hard conversations features heavily worn shoes to symbolize the dogged and not seeing eye to eye. determination of John Lewis. Lewis, who, today, still Laid out is a split and aged tree-trunk section represents Georgia’s Fifth District in Congress, was a giant steppin' for you: the Walker reminiscent of a telephone pole, subtly underscoring in the Civil Rights movement, the only living member of (Honoring John Lewis)2004 ideas of conversation and communication already “The Big Six,” who led the March on Washington for Jobs 32 7 / 8 x 24 x 16 28 29 Umberger in Memory of the blood connoted by the table itself. Atop is a snarl of barbed wire, moment.” Both disruptive and generative, it “signals the table of Holley might find some irony in an insider’s call for they intertwine and expand—many stories and one story, rusted, tangled, and fierce like a fight frozen in space. It kind of productive dissonance that occurs as we work at discussion artists to work outside a system that has blocked access to collectively as “surreptitiously coherent as a dream.”49 2005 is hard to avoid associating the barbed wire with Christ’s the edges of disciplines, on the margins of social life, and detail so-called “outsiders” for so long, but Gompertz and other His art is poetic but subversive, historically specific crown of thorns, an overt symbol of suffering but, perhaps, in the vexed spaces between academic and nonacademic prescient members of the modern and contemporary art and utterly abstract, talismanic and rooted, intentional more precisely something meant to inflict pain and communities.” They continue: “Our world is bound up with set are increasingly coming to a place that advocates of the and intuitive. Since 2010, Holley has lived and worked challenge authority. Hopelessly snared and torn amid the a proclivity for the percussive, as we divorce ourselves from vernacular and self-taught have been for decades. In this in Atlanta. His art and music now take him around the vortex of wire is a cloth that, at first, appears to be tinged ‘correct’ or hegemonic ways of being in favor of following work, we find a human story rather than an art-world story. world, and his recognition as an important American artist with blood, but upon closer inspection is the faded plaid of the rhythm of our own heartbeats.”47 Holley’s practice is an extension of his being; it is not merely continues to grow. At home, a more intimately scaled a worker’s shirt woven with scarlet and blue. The barbed Holley is an icon of following the rhythm of his own a daily meditation on gratitude or the complexities of life but version of his “Square Acre of Art” envelops the interior wire arcs and loops with a frenetic energy; strands of it are heartbeat. His originality positions him as a leader— a moment-to-moment survival mechanism, a pact he makes of his personal space, a place that feels like a protective dark and rusted, others are brighter steel, and they subtly someone to watch and follow, be inspired by, and and remakes with himself to find strength and beauty in a cocoon in which the debris of humanity seeks and is read as black and white. Characteristic of Holley’s style, the ultimately emulate in an age that far too often values world that wrapped its gifts in challenge. granted spiritual renewal. His world is at once amulet and sculpture can lead one’s mind in several directions, but the stylishly articulated but shallow, commercialized identity Holley’s sculptural works are personal and bedrock, studio and memory palace. And in Holley’s own central theme seems clear: Americans—from city streets frameworks. “Money and celebrity have cast a shadow over encompassing. They explore specific moments, even as words, “That’s just beautiful.”50 to the art world—are not succeeding at conversations the art world which is prohibiting ideas and debate from about race. coming to the fore,” wrote former Tate Gallery director Speaking about African American vernacular art, and BBC arts editor Will Gompertz, critiquing an art- Young discusses this country’s belated recognition of an world system in which dealers, collectors, curators, and artistic vein that lays bare deep conflicts: historical, racial, museums collude to maintain the value and status of artists environmental, and ethical. “It forces us to see things we who don’t hold up to critical scrutiny. He hopes that the would rather ignore,” he writes. “These prophets of ordinary system is reaching a breaking point, and looks to artists. stuff speak with a power we would all like to avoid. Society “At the moment, it feels like a Paris salon of the nineteenth generally ignores its prophets, and does so at its own peril.”46 century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to Holley traveled a long road before finding art as a stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced practice of salvation, but today, at age sixty-five, the life a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created of an artist is the one he has walked the longest. Since modern art and a whole new way of looking at things.… the modern era, America has proudly championed art We need artists to work outside the establishment and start and music as vital components in a political democracy. looking at the world in a different way—to start challenging Nevertheless, artists of color who critique obfuscating preconceptions instead of reinforcing them.”48 histories, racialized violence, cultural dishonesty, and neoliberal commercial agendas rarely make it onto the mainstream stage. Yet, Holley is enjoying what members of the Crunk Feminist Collective call, “a percussive 30 31 Umberger in Memory of the blood Notes 13 Lonnie Holley, interview with the author, October 30, 2014, Atlanta. Holley Rodia’s cultural rootedness and structural innovations took a backseat to 36 Holley, Arnett typescript, January 23, 2015. recounts this story time and again; see also Melinda Shallcross, “The his perceived eccentricity in his lifetime, during which he was ridiculed 37 See Gunther Kress, “Cultural Considerations in Linguistic Description,” Poetry of Lonnie Holley,” Folk Art Messenger, vol. 6, no. 3 (spring 1993), 1, and harassed for a project that fell too far outside the status quo for many. Language & Culture, British Studies in Applied Linguistics, no. 7, in 1 George King, The Lonnie Holley Story, is due for release in 2015. and Judith McWillie, “Lonnie Holley’s Moves,” Artforum 30 24 Then called the National Collection of Fine Arts, Harry Lowe organized association with Multilingual Matters, Ltd. (Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, (April 1992), 80. 2 Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers (Chicago: University of Chicago the museum’s first installation of The Throne (acquired by the museum 1993), 1–2, and Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Press, 1974; reprinted by arrangement with Vintage Books, Random House, 14 McWillie, 81. McWillie, aided by William Arnett, interviewed Holley in 1970) in Hidden Aspects of the National Collection of Fine Arts (1971). Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Reidlinger, translated 2000), xvii. Nate Shaw’s real name has since been revealed to be Ned Cobb. extensively in 1991; these interviews are included in the Judith McWillie Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, who would go on to conduct the primary research from French by Wade Baskin (Open Court Classics, 1998; originally Papers 1984–2011, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. on The Throne as a curator at the museum, was at that time a published New York: McGraw Hill, 1915). 3 Ibid. graduate intern. 15 John Beardsley, “The Forest of Spirits, the Ark of Dreams,” Gardens of 38 William Arnett, quoted in Mark Binellijan, “Lonnie Holley, the Insider’s 4 Dwight Garner, “Lost in Literary History: A Tale of Courage in the South,” Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, from an interview with 25 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Outsider,” The New York Times Magazine, January 23, 2014. Accessed The New York Times Book Review; Critic’s Notebook, April 18, 2014. Lonnie Holley, 1993 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 181. Philosophy (Toronto: Random House, 1983), 146. online February 3, 2015, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/magazine/ Accessed February 1, 2015, at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/books/ lonnie-holley-the-insiders-outsider.html?_r=0 all-gods-dangers-a-forgotten-autobiography.html?_r=0 16 Keith Cartwright, Sacral Groves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern 26 See Leslie Umberger, Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds: Built Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority (Athens and London: Environments of Vernacular Artists (Singapore: Princeton Architectural 39 Holley, Arnett typescript, January 23, 2015. 5 Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement University of Georgia Press, 2013), 6. Press and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2007). of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: 40 Ibid. Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008), 4. 17 Holley, in McWillie, 83. 27 Lonnie Holley, “An Artist Goes Back to the Ocean,” in Paul Arnett and 41 Ibid. William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep, vol. 1, The Tree Gave the Dove 6 General information in this section about Holley’s early life comes from 18 William Arnett, “Out-Outgribing the Mome-Raths,” in Arnett and Arnett, a Leaf (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, in association with the Schomburg Center 42 Ibid. the author’s interviews with the artist in October 2014, Atlanta, unless vol. 2, 575. for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library, 2000), 6. otherwise noted. Holley also records this personal narrative in great depth 43 http://www.blackpast.org/aah/bloody-sunday-selma-alabama- 19 Holley in ibid. in “Lonnie Holley: The Best That Almost Happened,” in Paul Arnett and 28 Roberta Smith, “Esthetic Olympics: 5 Shades for 5 Rings,” The New York march-7-1965. Accessed by the author February 10, 2015. William Arnett, eds., Souls Grown Deep, vol. 2: Once That River Starts 20 McWillie, 81. As an unrelated aside, in 2014 Holley was granted an artist’s Times, July 4, 1996, C9. to Flow (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2001), 538–83, and in “Blackbirds” 44 http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/05/10/access.lewis.freedom. Accessed by residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, where he used some of 29 Malcolm Jones, Jr., “The Arts Games,” Newsweek (July 29, 1996), 64–65. (Theodore Rosengarten’s essay in this book). the author February 10, 2015. Rauschenberg’s own castoffs to make sculptures that bring the conversation of vernacular impulse and vision full circle. 30 Ibid. 7 Lonnie Holley, interview with the author, October 30, 2014, Atlanta. 45 Paul Arnett, “An Introduction to Other Rivers,” in Arnett and Arnett, 2000, xvi. 21 The first formal publications to include Holley and his art were Barbara 31 Holley, in Arnett and Arnett, vol. 2, 567. 8 Ibid. Shissler Nosanow, More Than Land or Sky: Art from Appalachia (published 46 Andrew Young, “Life Behind the Wall: A Call to Respond,” in Arnett and 32 In 2010, the exhibition Souls Grown Deep evolved into a foundation 9 The presumption of a masculine driver is the author’s; no facts about this for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Arnett, 2000, 5. dedicated to documenting, researching, preserving, and exhibiting the work accident have been uncovered. Press, 1981) and Robert Farris Thompson, John Mason, and Judith of self-taught African American artists of the American South. McWillie, Another Face of the Diamond: Pathways through the Black 47 http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/about/ 10 Denny Abbott, They Had No Voice: My Fight for Alabama’s Forgotten Atlantic South, exhibition catalogue (New York: INTAR Latin American 33 Holley, In Arnett and Arnett, vol. 1, 6. Children (Montgomery, Ala.: New South Books, 2013), xiii. Abbott 48 Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in the Art Gallery, 1988). William Arnett was the primary lender to the INTAR was a probation officer for the Montgomery County Family Court, whose 34 Holley, notes on the works of art; typescript provided by Matt Arnett, Blink of an Eye (New York: Viking, 2012). exhibition, and had a strong hand in its conceptual formation. duties included transporting juvenile offenders from the detention center in January 23, 2015. Montgomery to Mt. Meigs. 22 Holley, interview with the author, October 30, 2014, Atlanta. 49 Malcolm Jones, Jr., The Arts Games, 1996. 35 Laura Hutson, “Born of struggle and a Dickensian childhood, Lonnie 11 See Lonnie Holley as told to Theodore Rosengarten, “Blackbirds,” 23 Rodia’s site still occupies a triangular lot that was visible on the rail 50 Holley, interview with the author, October 30, 2014, Atlanta. Holley’s work is not Nashville’s typical public art,” Nashville Scene online: page 181 of this publication. line connecting Los Angeles and Long Beach. The tall spires, concrete http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/born-of-struggle-and-a- over armature inlaid with bright shards of pottery and glass, were colorful dickensian-childhood-lonnie-holleys-work-is-not-nashvilles-typical-public- 12 Lonnie Holley, in Arnett and Arnett, Souls Grown Deep, 556. and eye-catching, oddities for many passersby by but certainly dazzling. art/Content?oid=4358390. Accessed February 3, 2015. 32 33