Whether it’s through his visual art, musical performances or poetic storytelling, Lonnie Holley has captivated audiences across the world with his mesmerizing persona and improvisational creativity.
Rising out of immeasurable hardships, cruelty and poverty, his work speaks volumes about race, social class and culture in the American South. Created over the course of 22 years, the new documentary film Thumbs Up For Mother Universe: Stories from the Life of Lonnie Holley is a window into the world of an individual who, against all odds, has successfully moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Atlanta filmmaker George King was initially inspired by his curiosity towards a wave of self-taught artists who were emerging in the South during the ‘90s. He began interviewing different curators, gallerists and artists, but after spending an afternoon with Holley in Birmingham, AL, he knew he had found someone deeply fascinating, unapologetically authentic and ultimately the focus of his new film.
Born in Jim Crow-era Alabama as the seventh of 27 children, Holley says he was informally adopted as an infant by a woman who later traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey. He eventually landed at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, a notoriously brutal juvenile facility. Memories of traumatic experiences at Meigs resurface as influences throughout his artwork, and are further explored through the investigative history podcast “Unreformed” and his most recent album Oh Me Oh My, both of which were released earlier this year.
Holley’s first brush with art-making happened in response to a personal tragedy at the age of 29, when he carved gravestones out of discarded sandstone blocks for a niece and nephew who died in a house fire. Before long, his two-acre property transformed into a sprawling, immersive yard-art environment full of sculptures made from found objects and salvaged junkyard materials, though it was later destroyed in 1997 as part of the Birmingham International Airport’s expansion.
Since then, he seemingly hasn’t slowed down on churning out all sorts of idiosyncratic yet powerfully moving sculptures, drawings, paintings, photographs and other creative endeavors. Now 73 years old and widely embraced by the art world at large, Holley’s work appears in collections of many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Had King stopped the camera even a decade into the project, he may have missed out on yet another monumental plot twist in Holley’s life story. Though Holley had made home recordings of himself and was known to sing whatever was on his mind as he wandered around working, it wasn’t until 2012 at the age of 62 that he made his debut as a recording artist. Dust-to-Digital, an Atlanta-based archival label dedicated to unearthing rare recordings, released two albums, which have since been followed by an additional three albums on Jagjaguwar. Much like his artwork, his distinctive, soulful musical style transcends any sort of traditional genre or structure through its raw, spontaneous, intuitively led nature.
After over 20 years of filming and editing, Thumbs Up For Mother Universe finally held its first official private viewing at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta in December 2019, and was looking forward to an exciting roll out of public screenings right as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many film festivals were postponed or canceled altogether, while others moved to virtual formats. Still, the film received a handful of well-deserved awards and recognitions from festivals across the country. Currently, the film is pursuing screenings with museums, colleges and universities, arts organizations and community theaters before becoming more broadly available through streaming.
Naturally, with only 96 minutes’ worth of footage making the final cut, there’s a tremendous amount of material left over to explore. That’s where the film’s website, lonnieholleystory.com, comes in as an ongoing archive to preserve a variety of video clips, galleries of artwork, music videos, photographs of Holley’s art environment and even a 25-page transcript of King’s interview from 1997.
The act of creating is essentially a daily ritual for Holley, who has generally always been more interested in the process and expression of something more so than its profitability or permanence, and this has accumulated into a prolific, expansive body of artwork, recordings and performances. Many of these moments may have otherwise been lost to history had it not been for King’s long-term dedication to capturing a chapter of Holley’s lifelong vision.
King will offer a Q&A during a free screening hosted by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at Ciné on Tuesday, May 2 at 7 p.m.
WHO: Thumbs Up For Mother Universe
WHEN: Tuesday, May 2, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Ciné
HOW MUCH: FREE!
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