The seventh of 27 children, Holley was taken by another family to eventually live by his own. He rifled through his ways of survival as a small child in central Alabama. At the age of 11, Holley was locked inside the so-called Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, also known as Mount Meigs, an institution supposedly founded to be a “reform school” for children but ultimately operated as a modern-day plantation house. He lived in Mount Meigs for a period of his youth in the 1960s, surviving years of physical and emotional abuse and forced labour in the land.

The memories of these excruciating times vividly permeate his works. “Chain Gang: Mt Meigs” (2019) is a collection of kitchen forks that looks back at the day-to-day reality of this domestic space. Yet, there was nothing routine or mundane about daily life in Mt Meigs. Reflecting further on the horrors of slavery and transatlantic slave trade, “The Harvesters” (2020), a sculptural wooden piece, takes the shape of a net holding a miniature ship.

A common feature in Holley’s body of work is the silhouette, through which he draws and moulds various faces on different surfaces, often appearing in profile. Sweeping through the wire and metal sculptures raised on plinths and the colourful spray-painted paintings, the faces seem to congregate, as a union of Black voices and stories acting collectively. The painting “The Doorway to Us” (2024) is a fine example. “The Nine Notes” (2024), a large piece that incorporates antique church organ pipes alongside one of the spray paintings, speaks to the legacies of the African American victims who were killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting.

Listening to his latest studio album, “Oh Me Oh My”, an epic and mnemonic masterpiece that delves into his decades-long political and personal accounts of survival, I was struck by one of the final tracks, “I Can’t Hush”, where Holley sings, “I said to myself, Hush, Lonnie Bradley Holley. Or hush little Tonkie McElroy. Don’t you cry”, and later exclaims, “I can’t hush I’m the little baby that was born that cannot hush”. In “All Rendered Truth”, Lonnie Holley demonstrates how he cannot hush. Life and artmaking are entangled, neither expected to be hushed.