Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Bradley Holley (born February 10, 1950), sometimes known as the Sand Man, is an American artist, art educator, and musician.

He is best known for his assemblages and immersive environments made of found materials.

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

From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking.

He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes.

His early life was chaotic, and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood.

Born the seventh of 27 children, Holley claims to have been traded for a bottle of whiskey when he was four.

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 began his artistic life in 1979 by carving tombstones for his sister's two children, who died in a house fire.

He used blocks of a soft sandstone-like byproduct of metal casting which he found discarded in piles by a foundry near his sister's house.

Holley believes that divine intervention led him to the material and inspired his artwork.

Inspired similarly, he made other carvings and assembled them in his yard along with various found objects.

By the mid-1980s Holley 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.

In 1981, after he brought a few of his sandstone carvings to then-Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray, the latter helped to promote his work.

In addition to solo exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, Holley has exhibited in group exhibitions with other Black artists from the American South at the Michael C. Carlos Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, de Young Museum in San Francisco, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, among other places.

Holley's work is included in the representation of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

In 1981, Holley brought a few examples of his sandstone carvings to Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray.

The BMA displayed some of those pieces immediately, and Murray introduced him to the organizers of the 1981 exhibition "More Than Land and Sky: Art from Appalachia" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Soon Holley work was being acquired by other institutions, such as the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

His work has also been displayed at the White House.

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

He gets special pleasure from sharing his experience of learning to love oneself through creative activity.

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 some 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 wrote singled out Holley's work writing, "“Enter through a front yard re-created right down to the dirt floor, but a yard transformed, with broken tombstones, sprinkler heads, bedsprings, paintings, baby-doll parts—and all of it rejiggered by artist Lonnie Holley into a phantasmagorical vision as surreptitiously coherent as a dream. The rest of the show is not quite so overwhelming, but every piece is a wonder.'"

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

He rejected the airport authority's offer to buy the property at the market rate of $14,000, knowing that his site-specific installation had personal and artistic value he demanded $250,000.

The dispute went to probate court, and in 1997 a settlement was reached and the airport authority paid $165,700 to move Holley's family and work to a larger property in Harpersville, Alabama.

Holley's first major retrospective, ''Do We Think Too Much?

I Don't Think We Can Ever Stop: Lonnie Holley, A Twenty-Five Year Survey,'' was organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art and traveled in 2003 to the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England.

From May 2003 to May 2004, Holley created a "sprawling, sculptural environment" in the lower sculpture garden at the Birmingham Museum of Art as part of their "Perspectives" series of site-specific installations.

The creation of the work was documented in the film The Sandman's Garden by Arthur Crenshaw and in photographs by Alice Faye "Sister" Love.

Holley's work was included in the traveling exhibition "Mary Lee Bendolph, Gee's Bend Quilts, and Beyond" which started at Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe in November 2007, and hit the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2008, the Loveland Museum & Gallery in Loveland, Colorado, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis in 2009, the Berman Museum of World History, in Anniston, Alabama, and concluded at the Flint Institute of Arts, in Flint, Michigan in April 2010.

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), and Oh Me Oh My (2023).

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 NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale the same year then the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015.