Biography
Lonnie Holley is an American sculptor and musician born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1950, into the segregated Deep South. He was the seventh of twenty-seven children and was working by the age of five[1].
His youth was turbulent. He later worked as a litter-picker and grave-digger, survived a serious car accident, and spent time in juvenile detention[1].
He became an artist at 29, making sculpture from found and discarded materials, often on themes of violence and redemption. In the 1990s the Atlanta collector William Arnett took him under his wing, and his work has been shown at the United Nations and the White House Rose Garden[1].
He recorded music in the 1980s, but his public music career began in 2012 after Matt Arnett recorded him in Gee's Bend, Alabama. He has since toured with Deerhunter and Animal Collective, and Bon Iver has sampled his work[1].
References
- American sculptor Lonnie Holley woke up in a fucked up America and has turned to music to make sense of it — Interview with biography and Holley's later comments on the song