Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Bradley Holley (born February 10, 1950), sometimes known as the Sand Man,

His albums are Just Before Music (2012), Keeping a Record of It (2013), MITH (2018), National Freedom (2020), Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a collaboration with Matthew E. White (2021), Oh Me Oh My (2023), and Tonky (2025).

Early life Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950, in Birmingham, Alabama during the Jim Crow era.

Before beginning his career, Holley spent time digging graves and picking cotton. He claims to have been pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car. He became a father at 15 and now has 15 children. Holley also worked as a short-order cook at Disney World. He also did time at a notorious juvenile facility, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs.

Holley also became a guest at children's art events, bringing blocks of the foundry stone for children to carve.

By the mid-1980s, Holley's work had diversified to include paintings and recycled found-object sculptures. His yard and adjacent abandoned lots near his home became an immersive art environment that was celebrated by visitors from the art world but threatened by scrap metal scavengers and, eventually, by the expansion of the Birmingham International Airport.

Holley was included in the 1996 group exhibition "Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South," an exhibition of over 450 artworks by 29 other contemporary artists, highlighting a significant artistic tradition that has risen in concert with the Civil Rights Movement. Held at Michael C. Carlos Museum at City Hall East in Atlanta, it was organized by the museum, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) Cultural Olympiad, and the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs. Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones Jr., in his review of the show singled out Holley's work writing,

In late 1996 Holley was notified that his hilltop property near the airport would be condemned.

His work was also included in the 2014 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, "When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South" which also featured the work of Kevin Beasley, Beverly Buchanan, Henry Ray Clark, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, Theaster Gates, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Bessie Harvey, David Hammons, Ralph Lemon, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney McMillian, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Marie “Big Mama” Roseman, Jacolby and Patricia Satterwhite, Xaviera Simmons, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Geo Wyeth, and others. The exhibition travelled to the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale the same year, then the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015.

Holley installed sculptural work for the exhibition Groundstory: Tales From the Shade of the South, at Agnes Scott College of Decatur, Georgia, which ran at the Dalton Gallery (also in Decatur) from September 28 to November 17, 2012. In 2022, Holley was named a Fellow and received an unrestricted cash award from United States Artists (USA), a Chicago-based arts funding organization.

In 2015, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston presented Holley's first solo museum exhibition since 1994, featuring a residency, video, concert, and monographic catalog entitled "Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley." The exhibition showcased some of Holley's assemblage works since the early 1990s. For the residency, he created works on-site and visited with school groups and College of Charleston classes.

Two years later, Holley's work was featured with 61 others in "Revelations: Art from the African American South" at the de Young Museum to mark the debut of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco major acquisition from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta of 62 works. Other artists represented include Dial, sculptors Ralph Griffin, Bessie Harvey, and Joe Minter, painters Joe Light and Mary T. Smith, and artists Ronald Lockett, Mose Tolliver, and Purvis Young, and Gee's Bend quilt associates Jessie T. Pettway and Annie Mae Young. A writer for KQED described the show as a "breathtaking display of genius, grit and wit."

In 2018, his work was part of the exhibition "History Refused to Die" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary Black artists from the American South. It marked the Souls Grown Deep Foundation's 2014 gift of works to the museum. The Wall Street Journal reviewer called it "a sharply focused, elegantly installed selection" and the reviewer from The Art Newspaper described the show as "a salve to see an exhibition as succinct, as purposeful, intelligently designed and filled with good art."

Other group exhibitions marking respective institutional acquisitions from the Atlanta-based foundation include "Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2019, "What Carried Us Over: Gifts from the Gordon W. Bailey Collection" at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, "Living Legacies: Art of the African American South" at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2022, and "Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Other exhibitions "Outliers and American Vanguard Art," National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., January 28, 2018 – May 13, 2018; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 24 – September 30, 2018; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 18, 2018 – March 18, 2019 "We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South" at Turner Contemporary, Kent, England, February 7, 2020 – September 6, 2020 "Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South," Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 17, 2023 - June 18, 2023

Music career

Holley's professional music career began in 2006 when he made improvisational vocal recordings, at the urging of Matt Arnett (son of William Arnett), in an Alabama church using just a keyboard and a microphone. In 2012, he released his debut album Just Before Music on the Dust-to-Digital label, followed by Keeping a Record of It the following year. In September 2018, he released his third album MITH on Jagjaguwar. Pitchfork gave it' a 7.9 out of 10 rating.

Pitchfork gave Holley's 2020 album National Freedom an 8.0 out of 10 rating.

In April 2021, Holley released a collaboration album with Matthew E. White titled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection. Also in 2022, he has begun to record his fourth album, Oh Me Oh My, which was released on March 10, 2023, to critical acclaim: Pitchfork gave it an 8.5 out of 10 rating, and Paste included it on its list of the Top 10 albums of 2023, and the Washington Post interviewed Holley for it.

Discography Just Before Music (2012) Keeping a Record of It (2013) Live on the Modern World with DJ Trouble – April 2013 MITH (2018) National Freedom (2020) Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection (2021) – with Matthew E. White Oh Me Oh My (2023) Tonky (2025)