The Parrish Art Museum presents “Everything That Wasn’t White: Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House,” an exhibition of 35 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture by artist and musician Lonnie Holley, organized by Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, Art and Education.
On view April 24 through September 6, “Everything That Wasn’t White” features a selection of works created during the artist’s five-week residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton in November 2020.
On Friday, April 23, at 6 PM, Holley will join Longwell for an evening of live, improvisational performance that will be broadcast online. Throughout the program, Holley will be in conversation with Longwell, play the keyboard and sing, and will be accompanied by Washington Duke on drums and percussion.
On May 1, the concurrent exhibition, “Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in De Kooning’s Fence” opens at South Etna Montauk Foundation and will be on view through August 29 — opening guests may meet the artist outdoors on the Foundation’s lawn from noon to 6 PM.
For his exhibition at the Parrish, Holley combined recurring imagery drawn from his life, as well as found objects, and unconventional materials and approaches to create his highly personal, layered works. He made over 100 pieces during his residency that build on his decades-long creative approach and visual language. In addition, the artist began exploring new methods: He stretched quilts over wood frames as the basis for a series of mixed-media paintings and created paintings on canvas at a much larger scale.
Completely self-taught, Holley was born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham — the seventh of his mother’s 27 children. He spent his early life in foster homes and forced labor. From age 11 to 13, he was consigned to the notoriously punitive Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children for violating a Birmingham curfew. The 1970s were defined by a series of odd jobs and relocations until he returned to Birmingham in 1979 for the funeral of young niece and nephew who tragically perished in a house fire. To memorialize the children when there was no money for a tombstone, Holley found a piece of sandstone and carved it into a loving tribute. In that transformative moment he discovered a new path — creating visionary narrative sculpture from found objects to commemorate people, places, and events.
Holley’s work is filled with recurring imagery and motifs imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor. Anonymous profiles, chains, fences, Egyptian iconography, and references to enslavement and redemption reflect his life experience and ancestry. His use of evocative materials extends to paintings on quilts and mixed media works on paper, where stencil, silhouetting, and spray paint enable layers of meaning. Poetically descriptive titles — such as “Fragile Like a Child,” “Working to Loosen our Chains,” “I Can’t Breathe (I See the Air But I Can’t Get It),” and “My Lord, She Saw Our Freedom” — read like the litany of a life of struggle and defeat, as well as faith and grace.
Register at parrishart.org.