Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Holley has been making art since 1979, devoted to a practice of improvisational creativity that spans painting, sculpture, filmmaking and music, often using found materials to relay histories that are both autobiographical and collective. His work addresses universal themes such as humanity’s fraught relationship with nature and technology, while also confronting specifically American histories – from the legacies of Jim Crow and the victories of the Civil Rights movement to ongoing struggles with racial and class-based narratives. 

Holley’s prolific artistic output has undergone a transformational period in its reception over the past five years. This reappraisal was spearheaded by a series of insightful institutional exhibitions, alongside an ongoing wave of journalistic engagement, notably including the 2023 Peabody Award nominated podcast, Unreformed, which laid bare Holley’s traumatic lived experience at the tail end of the Jim Crow era in the American South.

Holley is regarded as one of the most influential living American artists. His accomplishments in the past two years alone include exhibitions at Camden Art Centre (UK, 2024) and at both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (both USA, 2025); Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the American Folk Art Museum (both USA); and the acquisition of major works by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (FR), the Norton Museum of Art (USA), and other leading institutions. Most recently, Rizzoli published a career-spanning monograph (2025), coinciding with the release of Holley’s critically acclaimed fifth studio album, Tonky. Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, Alabama, 1950)  is signed to Jagjaguwar and lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.