The Brooklyn Rail

The self-taught artist and musician Lonnie Holley largely improvises his songs. In a gravelly, soulful voice, he tends to state and re-state a point, then riff on it over thick and crackling instrumentals. “The Burden (I Turned Nothing into Something),” a track out this year on Tonky, his seventh album since 2012, expresses his desire to move forward without being exclusively defined by the past and nods to the intrinsic value he senses in discarded objects. Holley was born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. As a child, he was neglected, abused, and passed around from place to place. He eventually got the nickname “Tonky” in a honky tonk. A while later, in 1961, police picked him up and sent him to a vicious labor camp that masqueraded as a school. In 1979, he turned his full attention to artmaking.

Curator John Beardsley takes on the task of summarizing Holley’s hardscrabble life in the opening essay of the recent monograph on this artist. The essay builds from a long-format interview with Holley by the historian Theodore Rosengarten in the 2015 exhibition catalogue, Something to Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley. Beardsley puts Holley’s early life against the backdrop of a segregated and polluted Birmingham—ground zero for catalytic events in the Civil Rights Movement—and conjectures that police may have picked up young Holley in conjunction with efforts to suppress nonviolent protests.

The new book features reproductions of neatly written setlists on a rainbow of colored papers to represent the music. Reading them, we can learn, for instance, that at Artists Space ten years ago, Holley performed songs like “I’ve Run Away So Many Times, but I Just Can’t Escape,” though we don’t get much more information than this. Similarly, stills don’t adequately represent Holley’s work in film and video. Readers would likely want to learn more about his directorial debut, the hard-to-find short I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (2019), which premiered at Sundance, or I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America (2018), a music video where he sleeps under covers that appear to be made by the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers.

Lonnie Holley emphasizes the power of the artist’s experience and the fluidity between his pursuits of painting, sculpture, and music, without offering details about individual works; it refuses to veer toward anything resembling institutional art history. Adding careful literary, film, or art historical analysis, or even reprints of past reviews, would have done more to address the book’s title and the full scope and impact of the artist’s endeavors. Still, effort is made in the book to show how Holley fills outdoor and indoor environments with sculptures, and the images of artworks are crisp and dazzling, even without further descriptions or analysis.

Holley’s work ultimately redeems the shortcomings of the project. The highlight is his assemblages of cast-off objects installed in his backyard or other outdoor spaces—often stacks of rusty or busted-up furniture, tools, and wood. Collectively, these sculptures represent a kind of archaeology, history unearthed from the junkyard, combinations that appear as improvisational as the artist’s singing. Writing about these works, the poet Harmony Holiday asks in the second essay in the book:

How else would you reorder a decimated domestic space and connect it with whole villages and cities and nations and mothers’ tongues destroyed? What better revenge than this capacity to turn every scrap of the whirlwind into meaning, into actual electricity that lights a way back to the time both before and after all this destruction?

Like tornadoes full of sharp things, these reorderings are occasionally terrifying. A Black mannequin tied to a chair has limp legs and bloody intestines in Misuse of Woman (1988). Hung Out III (2020) consists of paper targets hung neatly on a drying rack like a killer’s laundry. You can almost hear a couple of eerie or plaintive notes slip out from these and other sculptures. In The Music Lives After the Instruments is Destroyed (1984), a wire figure, like a spider making a web, seems to be trying to build some connective filament between the remains of two burned instruments—a vintage reed instrument and an electric guitar—maybe inventing a way to go both backward and forward in time.