BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM OF ART
MAY 2003 - MAY 2004

The Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) is pleased to present the sculpture of Lonnie Holley for the eighth installment of the PERSPECTIVES series. Holley, a renowned self-taught artist and native of Birmingham, created his work last May on-site in the Museum's Sculpture Garden. The sprawling sculptural environment encompasses the entire area of the Sculpture Garden's Lower Plaza. Perspectives 8 is part of the Museum's ongoing PERSPECTIVES series of exhibitions focused on contemporary art and will be on view through May 2004.

Perspectives 8 features an outdoor sculptural environment utilizing found materials and the detritus of our industrial society. His material includes discarded computer parts, scrap metal, wire, wood, lamps and fabric, which he has reclaimed and reformulated into art. Remarking on Holley's distinctive talent, Dr. David Moos, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the BMA, states:

"Lonnie is classified as a self-taught artist because he received no formal training, [but his] prodigious and innate abilities as a visual artist simply make him one of the most innovative and eloquent of contemporary visual artists in Alabama."

Lonnie Holley was born in Birmingham in 1950, the seventh of twenty-seven children. He persevered through a difficult life beset with poverty, depression and familial strife. It was not until 1979 that Holley discovered his penchant for art after unemployment and depression caused him to nearly take his own life. Holley began soul-searching, praying, and soon discovered a type of stone in his sister's yard, which was near a cast iron foundry. Holley believed it was divine intervention that led him to the sandstone, an industrial by-product of cast iron molds, and inspired him to create art. Holley's first work consisted primarily of gravestones, but it was not long before his home near the Birmingham Airport was overflowing with thousands of his sandstone sculptures.

Holley received his first notice in 1981, when he took his work to the Birmingham Museum of Art. The director of the Museum was so impressed that he contacted a friend at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was organizing an exhibition of Appalachian artists. Holley was included in this exhibition, More Than Land and Sky, which traveled to 10 museums throughout the region. His work, which now includes mixed-media sculpture and painting, has been featured in numerous exhibitions. Several prominent museums also feature Lonnie's work in their permanent collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Michael C. Carlos Museum and High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City.

Lonnie Holley, who now lives in Harpersville, AL, continues to make art as a cathartic, self-healing undertaking. Despite his critical praise in the art world, Holley's priority continues to be serving as a positive role model for children. He often travels to schools throughout the region and nation, working with countless children. As Holley states:

"My art is helping the mind to realize the depths to which we can go, and helping people in the first stage of learning how to help yourself, be yourself and love yourself."

The Perspectives series has been generously funded by Pauline Ireland.

For more information, please contact Jennifer Hatchett, Assistant Director of Media at the Birmingham Museum of Art at (205) 254.2707 or email jhatchett@artsbma.org.

Back to Top