Lonnie Holley is working in clay now — it’s his first show in this medium exclusively, and it began this weekend at Dallas Contemporary.
The show is titled “Coming From the Earth,” and it comes about after the gallery invited him to visit Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico last year. (BTW, the place is a DREAM.) He spent two-and-a-half weeks making things from clay, visited the round pyramids in the area, and studied the techniques of skilled craftspeople.
His works at Dallas Contemporary will be on view through August 21.
Some of Lonnie’s newest music:
Headed to the Land we were Promised, New Orleans (photographed last month)
Lonnie Holley, Supported by the Power, at the New Orleans Museum of Art (I photographed November 2021)
The excellent, excellent Toledo Museum of Art’s Living Legacies: Art of the African American South exhibit closes May 1. It was not yet up when I was there this summer, but the TMA is a world-class museum and this will not disappoint, I promise. Go if you can.
…features 24 works, from large-scale assemblages and mixed media sculptures to paintings, textiles, and works on paper acquired from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Artists represented are Leroy Almon, Thornton Dial, Thornton Dial, Jr., Richard Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, John B. Murray, Royal Robertson, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Luster Willis, and several generations of women quiltmakers, including Louisiana Bendolph, Mary Elizabeth Kennedy, Jessie T. Pettway, Lola Pettway, Lucy T. Pettway, Martha Pettway, Rita Mae Pettway, and Florine Smith, as well as Estelle Witherspoon, one of the founders of the Freedom Quilting Bee. In recent years, these artists’ innovative practices have received overdue recognition throughout institutional spaces and in the larger cultural discourse. This exhibition will celebrate their crucial contributions to a broader understanding of American art as well as their enduring legacies.
PS: Joe Minter sends everyone his love. Saw him last month and will get by again next week. xoxo!