Simply stated, Lonnie Holley’s exhibition at the Halsey soared. The approximately 40 sculptures were selected from the collection of William S. Arnett and the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which Arnett founded, as well as the African-American artist’s own collection. Elegantly curated by Halsey director Mark Sloan, “Something to Take My Place,” titled after a 2008 sculpture of nearly the same name, focused on discrete objects—solos rather than a choir, dazzling though the artist’s environments can be.

A brilliantly resourceful artist’s timely exhibition at Charleston, South Carolina’s Halsey Gallery is the latest development in a remarkable career

Like most solo exhibitions by widely known contemporary artists, Lonnie Holley’s “Something to Take My Place” was scheduled more than two years before it opened. But its timing and location turned out to be more appropriate than anyone could have predicted. The compelling show of Holley’s raggedly assertive, socially engaged sculptures was on view in the Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, from late August into early October 2015. This placed it chronologically between two events destined to cast a long historical shadow in South Carolina and the rest of the nation–the massacre in one of Charleston’s oldest black churches on June 17, and a millennial flood that struck that city and much of the state in early October.

It’s impossible to separate the past from the present. As we go throughout our day, memories shape and color much of how we perceive the world around us. At the same time, traditions are recast to better fit the modern world. These are the concepts that unite the works of Susan Klein and Jiha Moon, which will be on display at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art from Oct. 23 to Dec. 5. The final exhibits of the gallery’s 2015 season, the art of Klein and Moon combine the old and the new to create two compelling collections that challenge the viewer.

Artist and musician Lonnie Holley (b. 1950, Birmingham, Alabama) said that people like him offer alternative ways of “making, thinking, living, and being.” He then asks himself has he done enough? If the works on view in his impressive and challenging solo at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art are any indication, he has done quite a lot. And it’s only a fraction of his prodigious output since the early 1990s, when he first became seriously engaged in art, after carving headstones for two of his sisters after their untimely death (he comes from an improbable family of 27 siblings and has 16 children of his own). If it is not enough, it is only in the sense that he’s not done; objects continue to pour from his miraculous, be-ringed hands as if from a spigot on full blast.

“I am an artist of America,” declared Lonnie Holley during a talk for the opening of his exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. This self-identification was Holley’s response to being labeled a folk artist throughout his career. While the visibility of his work may have suffered due to this label—his most recent solo museum show was in 1994—Holley proves himself in this exhibition as a capable and provocative artist with a large body of work.

With a gift for seeing meaning in the things others throw away, Lonnie Holley is showing the art world that beauty is where you find it. 

“This is the smallest thread,” Lonnie Holley says, holding up one red fiber, as thin as a hair. “It can matter.” He lets go and the string blows in the wind, part of a mobile Holley has sculpted from a coat hanger, a root, the lid of a tin can, and two seashells glued together. It hangs outside of an Atlanta storefront that was once a pizza parlor, among other things, but now serves as Holley’s art studio. The doors are open to an interior so filled with found material—Styrofoam, animal bones, tree roots, two old radios, stacks of stone, a web of wires strung from the ceiling—that some of it is tumbling out the door. It’s just trash, waiting to be picked up.

Photo Gallery

Found object artist’s Halsey exhibition “Something to Take My Place” is on view until Oct. 10, but that doesn’t mean the artist is laying back admiring his work. Instead, Holley stopped by the Marion Square Farmers Market this weekend and we got a look at the man behind the work.

Artist and musician Lonnie Holley has lived a life so rich in metaphor that, after learning something of his biography, one finds oneself wondering: Can it possibly all be true? Or is Holley just better at seeing the symbolism, the universal connections, that lie behind the thin yet often impenetrable veil of the everyday?

Given that Holley creates his art out of what other people throw away, the latter is the safer bet.

“I’m in London” might not sound like a promising opening line, but when half-chanted in a blues-inflected moan by Lonnie Holley, it felt laden with significance. And it was. Holley was soon conjuring the ghosts of his Alabama past, a future free of want and the spirit of mother earth with snippets of lyric, hollers, shouts and the occasional jaunty whistle.

Holley might sound like an itinerant bluesman, albeit one with shamanistic intent, but his music tells a different tale. His keyboards combine jangly textures and stark arpeggios, splayed chords and one-note riffs to reach back into the past but, like Sun Ra’s, they have a futuristic bent. One piece started by noting that Pluto was “a place in space that once was a planet, but now isn’t a planet at all”. It went on to conjure illicit stills and earthquakes, whales and the Great Spirit.