Lonnie Holley
UT Downtown Gallery, Knoxville, TN
The University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery is pleased to present a selection of Lonnie Holley’s recent works on paper, sculpture, paintings, and short films. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Knoxville’s Big Ears Music Festival, which will feature a performance by Holley on Thursday, March 30.
Lonnie Holley’s life and work read as a narrative retelling of Black American history—the residual effects of the Jim Crow era, the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, and the struggles with false narratives around class mobility and race. Holley’s multidisciplinary practice seeks to educate viewers as a means of remedying the historical amnesia surrounding these topics. Rooting himself in the events of the past, the artist moves into the future—presenting synesthetic, multimedia work that visually engages its viewers with unique found objects and intricate motifs to subsequently inform on topics such as inequity and history as memory. Known throughout the art world for his found-object sculptures, paintings, and installations, Lonnie Holley gained a new audience when he started releasing and performing his music during the 2010s.
Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, AL, 1950) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many others. Holley’s work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions including at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2022); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2021); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (2017); Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art; Charleston, SC (2015); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2004), and many more. Holley has been the subject of several documentary films, and his own directed short film I snuck off the slave ship premiered at Sundance in 2018.