Lonnie Holley
All Rendered Truth
Camden Art Centre, London, UK
Camden Art Centre is delighted to present the first institutional solo show in London by acclaimed American artist and musician, Lonnie Holley. The exhibition will center new works made during a production residency in the UK earlier this year, alongside previously unseen sculptures made at The Mahler and LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy in 2023.
Active across more than four decades, Holley is recognized as an important figure in the Black Art tradition from the southern states of America, as well as a significant artist in the mainstream of international twentieth century and contemporary art. He has a visionary capacity to intuit and reveal to others the significance, symbolism, and meaning of the overlooked and discarded. He learned how to make art as a child in the “creeks and ditches” around his home in Alabama where he would dig for worms and find buried objects. As if connected to the regenerative cycles of decomposing organic matter in the soil, and in an act of recuperation, he introduces a redemptive aspect to rejected objects, giving them dignity and new life.
Holley finds beauty in what is immediately at hand, compulsively improvising to convey his meaning “by any means necessary.” Influenced from an early age by American culture—sneaking through back doors or sewer pipes to the drive- in cinema and Alabama State Fairground, or working at Disneyland Orlando—Holley’s primary material has been the iconography and cultural refuse of Americana, signifying the failed promise of the American dream. A recent production residency in Suffolk has enabled him to direct this methodology to objects and materials salvaged here in the UK, including blackberry vines and Victorian glass apothecary bottles, bringing new narratives into play.
In a monumental new work, Nine Notes, Holley has repurposed components of a pipe organ to commemorate the nine people who died in a church massacre in 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina—an important site for the Black community through the journey of emancipation. Holley had visited the church a few months prior to the deadly event, when Dylan Roof, a white supremacist, murdered members of the congregation in a racially motivated attack. The pipe is a motif that runs throughout the show—a metaphor for the life giving air that passes through a body, the anima or spirit—and in another new assemblage piece made in the UK, Holley deploys a piece of flattened copper pipe retrieved from a road intersection in West London, beaten down by traffic and compressed to a ribbon.
Two large new sculptures titled Without Skin amass groups of unupholstered chairs, wrapping them in decommissioned industrial “attack hoses” used by the US Fire Service to quench fires. This poignant work invokes the memory of people who were deliberately trapped inside burning churches in acts of racial violence, as well as the hoses used in aggression to suppress the social uprisings of the civil rights movement, in some cases, literally flaying the victims.
The show will include a large group of sculptures outlining faces seen in profile, a kind of drawing in space made using twisted wire, a material Holley returns to again and again to signify connection, communication, and networking, as well as danger, containment, and incarceration. These portraits, alongside a new body of large-scale paintings, honor his ancestral lineage, including Yoruba and Native American heritage—the lives that have gone before and that are carried in the artist’s DNA. The faces Holley paints are an homage to those whose identities are unknown, but whose contribution to the progress of humanity and the service of others deserves recognition.
Holley’s work continues and extends the assemblage tradition of modern and contemporary American artists that might include Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Betye Saar, and Ed and Nancy Kienholz. His totemic bricolage of salvaged materials combines an animistic collaboration with materials and objects in the African tradition—treating bones and hide ritualistically while acknowledging their spirit—with a highly narrative approach to everyday objects and the traces they carry, including tires, tree roots, shoes, and chairs.
With immense generosity and a willingness to share his experiences with others, Holley’s work is infused with, and highly conditioned by, his own journey—including the poverty and hardships of his early childhood, his immersion in the civil rights movement, the legacies of slavery, and the systematic oppression and exploitation of Black people. Whilst being deeply rooted to a specific, traumatic place and past, Holley speaks with hope and humility to universal concerns, projecting an inspirational message about how to live a life well and to prepare a world for future generations. The work speaks powerfully about our shared humanity, but also what is beyond the human condition, expressed through his deep love of the natural world which extends to other organisms, life-forms, the planets, and stars. As the artist often asserts, his work gives a “thumbs up to mother universe.”