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Lonnie Holleyâs Life of Perseverance, and Art of Transformation
The Alabama artist and musician has arrived at a career milestone, with two exhibitions in the Hamptons and a gallery to map his future.
The self-taught artist Lonnie Holley at the South Etna Montauk Foundation with his “Untitled Wall Painting,” 2021, and a growing collection of scavenged finds worn on his wrists.Credit.Kendall Bessent for The New York Times
By Yinka Elujoba
May 6, 2021Updated 4:08 p.m. ET
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. â Lonnie Holleyâs life began at an impossible place: 1950, seventh among his motherâs 27 children, in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Ala., the air thick with violent racism toward him and everyone he loved. Things got even worse as he grew up. At four years old, he said, he was traded for a bottle of whiskey by a nurse who had stolen him away from his mother. Later, as the story goes, he was in coma for several months and pronounced brain-dead after being hit by a car that drag