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Becoming Closing Celebration: Lonnie Holley (Listening Gallery)
On Wednesday, December 9, multidisciplinary artist and improvisational musician Lonnie Holley comes to The Branch for a live performance marking the closing of Becoming.
Through music and storytelling, Holley will reflect on his own work and his friendship with Thornton Dial, whose art he helped bring to wider attention. In 1987, after seeing handmade fishing lures Dial had created, Holley introduced him to collector William Arnett. Both artists found possibility in discarded materials, transforming what others left behind into powerful reflections on Black life, struggle and Southern history.
Holley’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art and other major collections.
Seated tickets are $35, with $10 standing-room tickets available in the listening gallery. Tickets include wine, beer and light bites. Doors open at 5:30 PM and the program begins at 6 PM. Free parking is available in the First Baptist Church lot next to the museum
Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, AL, 1950) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and improvisational musician, whose work explores themes of personal and collective history, racial inequality, environmental catastrophe, and American identity. Born into the harsh reality of Jim-Crow era Alabama, Holley’s early life was defined by transience, cruelty, and economic hardship. Separated from his family as a young boy, Holley spent three years at The Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a brutal state institution that has been called a modern-day slave plantation. Growing up impoverished, Holley made do with what he could find, often the broken and discarded objects of human consumption – materials he refers to as, “trash, garbage, and debris.” His ability to combine these objects into beautiful and socially resonant works of art made Holley a leading figure in the long-overlooked movement of Black Southern visual artists. Holley’s work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, and many others.
