The Unseen of America, with Lonnie Holley

On Tonky, the self-taught sculptor and musician writes another shattering love poem to the human race.

by Khagan Aslanov

Photos by Viva Vadim

Published on March 20, 2025

“Tonky was a lost child. And I learned my name. It was almost like a little baby slave having to learn name after name after name, all the way to eventually having to re-learn Lonnie Bradley Holley.”

This is how Lonnie Holley begins our conversation: how he explains the name of his latest album, and how he sees himself through the years of his life. And what a life it has been.

Holley had entered into Jim Crow’s contemporary paradigm of enslavement at an early age, and perhaps even at birth. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, one of 27 children, he was taken from his mother before he could barely walk or speak. When Ms. McElroy, his new guardian, died, her husband tried to kill him out of anger for his loss. Holley then spent months in a coma after being hit by a car, and upon waking up, began a long, winding journey of solitude and destitution.

Somewhere along that timeline, as he scavenged for food, he was arrested and placed into an “Industrial School,” the South’s brutalized mechanism of reenacting plantation slavery as a form of corrections. From there, he entered the country’s invisible class, drifting along with memory, and finding trouble as it found him. In the late ’70s, he finally made his way back home, to mourn, as his newborn niece and nephew had perished in a house fire. Seeing that the family could not even afford tombstones for the graveyard, Holley went to a local foundry and built grave markers from discarded sandstones. Those were the first sculptures he’d erect, his apotheosis, the sui generis of Lonnie Holley as an artist and a person.

A tenth of this would be enough to dismantle anyone else’s humanity, but here Lonnie Holley is in front of me, bright and kind and as big as a mountain. It is kindness, specifically, that is the driving impetus behind his art. Like only a few of us could, Holley went through all of this, somehow emerging alive and needed on the other side, full of modesty and candour, carrying his many scars with utmost grace.

Much like his sculptures, Holley’s music feels like something vital summoned from cast-off aspects. He has tackled race and cruelty before. But on Tonky, much like on its 2023 companion album, Oh Me Oh My, those themes are put through his personal history, the sum of his disenfranchisement and the person that endured. In Holley’s deft and loving hands, detritus finds new and often better life, becoming something more than assemblage – a curative force.

“Some people tell me that I am just singing the blues. I don’t know what is blues, or jazz, or pop. It is the rhythm that I am in. I bring it to you like I hear. If I was not the type of artist that could yield kindness, this conversation would not be necessary. Hope only comes when we bring it forth,” Holley says, his singular, grainy voice cracking, as he tears up throughout our talk.

As for Tonky, it is a force in and of itself as well, a collection of music that transcends any given genre. Both acoustical and electronic instruments plait into a dense and soulful mesh of sound, with Holley’s voice as a beacon in the dark. It is of little wonder that some of the most lasting, urgent and essential African-American artists of today, like Moor Mother, Saul Williams and billy woods, have been appearing on Holley’s pieces. He has become an icon of perseverance and hope. And his life, in all of its ferocity, is a symbol of survivalism and love. Even when he speaks of his experience surviving through that industrial school, he somehow does so without malice:

“It is a blood offering for the struggle. I had to run away in order to get caught. And then they beat the blood out of me to keep the other children from running away. I was made an example. And I’m still that example,” says the humble, unostentatious artist, whose visual art, against all systemic odds, is now in the Smithsonian.

As our conversation comes to a close, Holley smiles and gives me a thumbs up, instantly flashing my mind back to the now-iconic cover of his 2018 project MITH, his elongated, ring-adorned thumb curving like the neck of a bird.

I don’t know if it was divine intervention, good fortune or some random particle roil that drove Holley to that foundry that day, to extract those sandstones and begin building his first true labour of love. But one thing is clear — No matter how tragic the path toward it was, it’s incredible that he did. Otherwise, we all would have lost something.