An Interview with Lonnie Holley

By Scott Snyder
The Outsider, Volume 4/Issue 1/Fall 1999

As we reported in the Winter 1998 edition of The Outsider, artist Lonnie Holley, who created an art-environment from what others discard as junk, received a $165,700 settlement from the Birmingham International Airport that forced him to move. Living on the quarter-acre site for 18 years, Holley relocated to Harpersville, about 25 miles southeast of Birmingham.

Unfortunately, the transition to the new home has been less than smooth for Holley. The good news is he was given a beautiful house on about a dozen acres of land that the government had confiscated. The bad news is Holley’s new neighbors are the siblings of the woman whose land was taken away by law enforcement, and they have openly feuded with him since the day he moved in. Holley has recovered from a shooting incident last year, but ongoing struggles with his neighbors continue to impede his effort to create a new art-environment.

The interview that follows was conducted in 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition “Fundamental Soul: The Hager Gift of Self-Taught African-American Art” at the Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, Illinois. The exhibition curator Scott Snyder visited with Lonnie Holley at his Birmingham, Alabama home.

Snyder: What is the first material that you worked with?

Holley: The sandstone is the first material that I worked with. You’ll see a lot of it down in the yard. I didn’t know nothing about sculpture when I first started and I didn’t know nothing about art. I was just doing these things. I didn’t know then, but I do now.

Snyder: The sandstone you use is an industrial by-product of some kind as I understand it. Is it safe to use?

Holley: I’ve eaten quite a bit of sand over these years so I don’t worry about this being a hazardous kind of sand. My children and me kind of grew up on this sand. So I always tell the teachers [at schools I visit] if it was dangerous to me because I was the first tester before I brought it to your students. So it’s good to ensure them that the material that you’re working with would not be harmful to the students.

Snyder: How did you get started as an artist?

Holley: My very first pieces were baby tombstones. I did them for my sister’s children who got burned in a house fire. I did it out of this material [sandstone]. So I started working for life, because I think death had affected the way we were.

Snyder: We, meaning your family?

Holley: We needed to learn from each other. My mother had 27 of us. I’m the seventh of my mother’s 27 children. I have 15 of my own. My children are growing up. They are artists, writers, I’ve got a son that’s a doctor and a daughter that’s a lawyer. Their minds are good, but we have to teach them how to work after something; how to go out and do something for somebody else. I think my children are this way because each day they come out and see Daddy working. They saw Daddy steady at work, and they got a chance to see me working, making something out of plastic or garbage.

Snyder: Does this idea of family and heritage fit into your work?

Holley: [Holding up a small sculpture comprised of a preserve jar filled with corn and a flashlight pointing into it, held by a piece of barbed wire] We need to shine a light on what’s being preserved today because most of our preserve jars are empty. So it’s just a simple light, the barbed wire and the jar that can remind someone that Grandma cared enough about you, not only to take all this corn off of the cob, but she cooked it and she made sure that it was around if you got hungry. You see what I’m talking about. So I try to take the children back to the old values that are in their minds; that we separate from [the value system] and not that it separates from us.

What distinguishes garbage from art? Where do we find that it separated from what one calls garbage? [Holley holds up another sculpture] It’s really all clothes hangers, and you can see that silhouette of a face; another beautiful face there; another face there; and one face wanted to go different from the family. So this face went this way and got tangled up in the midst because it didn’t want to go the way of the family.

But what I do with these clothes hangers, I try to tell everybody in America we throw away about a billion of these. If we could teach our children how to just take them loose and anytime they want to do something, instead of going out and doing something bad, why not try to bend these wires and turn them up. Why not if you’re stressful, if you have problems, bend that stress out, allow that problem to be worked out into the material instead of taking it out on an individual?

Snyder: You like to take what might be otherwise thrown out and make something beautiful out of it.

Holley: If you don’t put it as garbage and trash in your mind, then you won’t throw it away as quick if you see it as material. If you see it as something that Mother and Father went out and bought, if you see it as something that Mother and Father labored over, then it is material. Now I took mine from that side of the street where someone had dumped it out over there and said it was trash and debris and garbage and I brought to this side of the street. I took it from there and brought it to here and made it into art.

This is iron ore [Holley brushes leaves away from a piece on the ground]. This is what our grandfather used to dig. But I carved a mask on here; you can see an eye, a cheek, a nose comes down, and the lip. I try to work in any kind of material. I tried to honor a little bit of everything back in some of my older works, but at that time nobody didn’t really understand what I was trying to do.

Snyder: You seem to have created an entire environment made out of your own sculptures here in your yard. How do you feel about your individual works when they are separated from the whole?

Holley: When I’m making a piece for a museum or gallery, [before it gets there] I’ve already seen it in its existence. I’ll separate it from the environment. I sometimes take it across the street where it can be by itself. I can appreciate my work then or in a museum or in those kinds of environments where the works can talk for themselves. Because there are so many [sculptures] here, if I wasn’t able to take them away I could have never gotten a chance to see what my real work was all about. Mr. Arnett [Bill Arnett is an Atlanta-area collector] allowed that to come about by showing my work.

Snyder: You’ve shown me sculptures made of all kinds of found objects and non-traditional materials. What do you think about traditional art-making compared with what you do?

Holley: Back in the older days, people were walking around on earth, they were spirited, considerate. They were considerate of our landscape; they showed us how beautiful the earth was in its first stage. I think those artists worked on the canvas because they didn’t have as much material to deal with as I have as an artist. I have more material to worry about, but the artists of yesterday or the day before—1600s, 1300s—back in those days—they didn’t have very much to deal with. They didn’t have to worry as much as we worry now. We have more things that cause us more harm.

I think that we should give at least a chance to the artist who is working in different materials. Maybe some of them cannot explain themselves. They are not all to be able to explain. We have people doing things in many manners where we can learn. We are making history for tomorrow.