What's The REAL Story Behind Lonnie Holley's Art? | Turner Contemporary скачать в хорошем качестве

What's The REAL Story Behind Lonnie Holley's Art? | Turner Contemporary

Lonnie Holley sits down with us to discuss art, his practice, and his beliefs. This is the perfect insight into the artist's thought process and creativity. About The Artist: Lonnie Holley was born on February 10, 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived in a whiskey house, on the state fairgrounds, and in several foster homes. His early life was chaotic and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and been displayed in the White House Rose Garden. In January of 2014, Holley completed a one-month artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva Island, Florida, site of the acclaimed artist’s studio. Holley did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley’s original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley’s music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation. In 2014, Holley continued to tour, completing another tour of Europe (Belgium, Norway, England, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France) and a USA/Canada tour with Daniel Lanois. Also in 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that they had acquired three sculptures by the acclaimed artist and musician, through the generosity of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Holley played a number of shows in 2015, touring Europe again to audiences in England, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. That tour kicked off with a show at Queen Elizabeth Hall, as part of David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival. In addition to his European tour, Holley played shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Hammer Museum in LA, The American Folk Art Museum, St. James Hall in Vancouver, The Charleston Music Hall, among many others, but the majority of the year was not spent performing live. In 2015, Holley recorded music for the film Five Nights in Maine, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and saw theatrical release in the summer of 2016. An exhibition of his visual art opened in the summer of 2015, titled Something To Take My Place: The Art of Lonnie Holley, at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, accompanied by a monograph of the same name. In the winter of 2015/16, Supported By the Power: Lonnie Holley, an exhibition of Holley’s sculptures opened at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center. Lonnie Holley continues to make art, record music, and tour occasionally, either alone or with collaborators. The songs and the shows are never the same, as Holley never performs the same song twice. In the summer of 2016, he embarked on a tour throughout the Southeastern United States, this time with a full band of frequent collaborators that included Ben Sollee, Stevie Nistor, Kelly Pratt, and Marshall Ruffin. On the tour, the band visited artists, art sites, and museums, and held workshops for adults and children along the way. In late September, 2016, Holley’s music was sampled on the acclaimed third album (22, A Million) from Bon Iver. That same month, Holley was a featured visual artist at AfroPunk/Atlanta, where his found object sculptures were on display. In November of 2016, Holley embarked on his fourth European tour, playing a number of festivals and music venues, culminating in a sold-out, two-night residency at the acclaimed Café Oto in London. He returned to the States in time for the premiere of the short documentary about Holley, The Man is the Music, at Doc NYC in New York. Additionally, he made wood block prints with Paulson Fontaine Press, collaborated on three etchings and a zine with artist Chris Johanson, played a number of concerts, spent a lot of time in the recording studio preparing for the release of his third album, due out in the spring of 2018 #contemporaryart #uk #interview