Alabama assemblage: last summer, in the walled garden of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Lonnie Holley turned a dumpster full of junk into dozens of striking sculptures. These works remain on view through May

Art in America, May, 2004 by Raphael Rubinstein

For its exhibition series titled "Perspectives," the Birmingham Museum of Art invites artists to create new works that remain on view in the museum for an extended period of time. Recent participants include conceptual wordsmith Lawrence Weiner, who did a wall piece, and architecture-minded installation artist Stephen Hendee, who retrofitted a museum stairwell with eccentrically shaped translucent panels. The current "Perspectives" artist, Lonnie Holley, chose the museum's 3,400-square foot, walled-in, raked-gravel sculpture garden as the site of his project, which remains on view through May.

The approach to "Perspectives" taken by Holley, an Alabama-based artist whose work relies heavily on assemblage, exemplified the improvisational and environmental nature of his work in general. At the beginning of last summer, the museum furnished Holley with a large dumpster and delivered it to a local junkyard where, on previous occasions, the artist had found materials for his assemblages. (In addition to working with assemblage, Holley also carves figurative works in soft. "sandstone," a compound that is used for mold-making in the iron industry and thus plentiful in Birmingham.) After Holley had filled the dumpster with hundreds of items that caught his eye, it was transported to the museum and lowered by crane into the middle of the enclosed garden, which is part of a larger sculpture garden designed in 1993 by artist Elyn Zimmerman and architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Using the space as an outdoor studio, Holley spent the summer of 2003 turning the assorted junk in the dumpster into dozens of sculptures. When he finished, the empty dumpster, which he painted with colorful patterns (some alluding to a nearby Sol LeWitt mural) and canopied by a large vinyl tarp (actually an old publicity banner), was left in the middle of courtyard, a clue to the artist's process; it also served as a kind of surrogate house, thus evoking Holley's longstanding practice of surrounding his rural homes with sculptures made of recycled materials.

Most of the sculptures are placed around the perimeter of the space, though a few stand near the dumpster, huddled under the tarp, which had afforded the artist some protection from the hot Alabama sun as he worked. There are figurative allusions everywhere, though the unlikely materials can make some of them hard to grasp. Computer components stacked on a wood palette with a small monitor on top suggest a figure in conversation with a larger sculpture that also has a computer-monitor head. A large, upright drill bit sprouts a wire-headdress; a tangle of wires and branches rides a rusty motorcycle; a bit of loose earth spread carefully on a metal pod turns it into a tribal mask. In some of the sculptures Holley is more explicitly figurative, bending wires into semblances of human profiles or, in at least one case, painting a head on an assemblage element. (Holley's paintings, an important aspect of his oeuvre, combine exuberant brushwork and mystical subjects.) There are also animal images, such as a large ducklike sculpture fashioned from a trestle, some pipes and tubing, a piece of carpet and a few bits of wood.

Other pieces are less representational. The back end of an upturned blue pickup truck disgorges a cornucopia of machine parts and old furniture. Two slightly askew yellow ladders, roped together with yellow nylon cord, lean against a wall, looking as if they were left there by a negligent worker. On a formal level, this piece offers a wonderful interplay of different types of linearity--the rectilinear ladder versus the biomorphic cords--and it doesn't take too long to begin reading it as a metaphor for the difficulty of human striving. Through works like this, Holley in effect teaches viewers how to look at the world of discarded objects as he does, to intuit the transformative potential and formal beauty inherent in everyday detritus. It's worth noting that he is the veteran of many legal battles with those who have failed to recognize the artistic status of his work [see A.i.A., May '97]. He also, quite obviously, invites us to make a connection between his transformation of junkyard scraps and the untapped potential of those who have been discarded by society.

Holley's work is compelling not only for its inventiveness and social implications but also for the way it brings together various traditions and precedents. This gathering of sculptures summons up much 20th-century assemblage, from Picasso to Richard Stankiewicz to Jean Tinguely (in particular, the latter's Homage to New York, in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960), and at the same time references the African-American tradition of the yard show. Holley's bent-wire heads recall Calder's early sculptures, while his bold informality has much to do with scatter art. Let's hope that in the wake of this exhibition and a survey show--recently at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and scheduled to come to Birmingham, Ala., this summer--his work, which is too often restricted to the ambience of vernacular or Outsider art, will become more widely seen.