Go tell it on the Mountain
February 17-18, 2024
For American artist Lonnie Holley, music is about all God’s children having shoes, writes Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba
If adversity leads to character development, American multidisciplinary artist Lonnie Holley has it by the mine load. He unearths misery and mistreatment and refines it into sculpture and music.
During his previous visit to Australia in September 2023 he exhibited Revelations in the rock at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The sculpture features a long-handled shovel, wedged and balanced under a stone: the raw materials used by destitute African-American labourers in the American South.
For Alabama-born Holley, being a Southerner for a long time meant being slow to come out of slavery, slow to change policies, rules and regulations about how to treat humans with dignity.
Two days before his 74th birthday, Holley speaks to Review in a video call from his home studio in Atlanta, Georgia. His voice has a lyrical Southern accent and he talks expressively with his hands, which are covered in rings and bangles. They form a metaphorical gauntlet on his left hand that enables him to reach down amidst the trash, garbage and debris in order to make something new.
Holley is entirely self-taught. His formations are referred to as found object assemblage, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp or Robert Rauschenberg. He digs into detritus and reassembles and rearranges what he finds to transform suffering into self-expression.
Holley remembers the first time somebody in Birmingham Alabama told him what he was doing was art. He was born in 1950, the seventh of 27 siblings. Growing up African-American in the Jim Crow era meant racial segregation. It meant poverty and malnutrition, and for many of his family it meant an untimely death.
One day, aged 27 or 28 he was in the front yard of his grandfather’s old house creating gravestones for his sister’s two children who had died in a house fire. Across the street was an abandoned property, where he gathered stones by the wagon load.
“I was doing all these different cuts out of this material. It was a sandstone, or core sand that they used in the foundry [to make] moulds for motors, fire hydrants and anything cast iron.’’
On that day, a man named Walter Mitchell stopped by. He lived four houses down from Holley’s grandfather. He was a Tuskegee Airman, one of the African-American military pilots and airmen from south of Birmingham who had fought in World War II.
“Mr. Mitchell said, ‘Wow, you one of them Holley boys ain’t you?’
And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’
He said, ‘You know what you doin’?’
And I said, ‘No, sir.’ I knew what I was cuttin’, but I didn't know what to call it.
He said, ‘You are doin’ somethin’ that I done seen all around the world.’ And he had flew all around the world. So he’d seen big sculptures of shiny, beautiful marble, I'm sure he probably had been into institutions where these things was common. And he saw me doing it, and he said ‘You are doin’ art.’
And I looked up and in my mind I said ‘art’. And I just kept on cuttin’ as he drove on by, but I remembered that.”
That was 1977 or 78, a moment that changed Holley and made him understand his craft.
“None of us really know what we're doing on this earth,’’ he notes, pointing to his previous jobs as a cook at Disneyland in Anaheim California. He’s collected garbage on the side of highways and worked as a gravedigger.
“But until somebody - a teacher or our parents - teaches us, we have to learn it.’’
It was the mid-80s, when William Arnett, a patron of self-taught Black artists, brought Holley into the established art world.
“I then began to fall deeper into my character of being an artist,’’ Holley says. “Bill helped me realise the importance of the materials that myself and a lot of other artists were using, to understand their value as part of American history.”
Holley’s art extends into music. He has released six albums, most recently Oh Me Oh My in 2023, collaborating with musicians such as Moor Mother, Michael Stipe of REM and Bon Iver. He describes his music as being about all God's children having shoes.
On his path to becoming the artist he is today Holley has crossed some lines. He remembers going to bed hungry and getting up hungry.
“I was so hungry, the consequences didn't matter. What you do to feed that hunger is by any means. And that's what made a lot of people get in trouble.”
For Holley, that trouble included a stint in juvenile detention. His traumatic tale is recounted, in his own words, in the Unreformed podcast on Apple podcasts and Spotify, which also touches on the lives of fellow African-Americans who were institutionalised at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, in conditions now considered modern slavery.
“It was not that we were never going to learn. But it was just we was young,’’ Holley says.
“We were just young out of slavery, we just had got off slave ships. We was like babies, and the slave ship was a new womb that we got put into, and then when the slave ships got to a point that they could deliver us as humans into another nation. It was like we got reborn into a new situation. And we had to learn it… It’s some years now, since my great-great-grandparents was brought here as slaves. But… I'm not that far away from being mistreated.”
Holley pushed through and is able to “Go tell it [on] the mountain”, a reference to James Baldwin’s 1953 novel, so that others can “get up out of your sadness or your misery. Go vote, start paying attention”.
Returning to Australia to tour his music, he says people like Moor Mother and himself are like ministers and preachers on the side of the road that put their tent up for a short period of time. If somebody wants to come in to hear and have a good time, they are encouraged to shout and be thankful.
Lonnie Holley will be performing with Moor Mother from 22 February at Perth Festival, then MONA FOMA, the Sydney Opera House and concluding his Australian tour at Melbourne Recital Hall on 28 February 2024.