Conservation Conversation: Lonnie Holley’s “Unwanted Things”
Ever wonder how we conserve works with unusual materials? Get a behind-the-scenes look at conservation from Julia Forbes, Katherine Jentleson, and Kyle Mancuso.
By Julia Forbes, Associate Director, Institutional Research; Katherine Jentleson, Senior Curator of American Art and Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art; and Kyle Mancuso, Curatorial Research Associate
“The material I work with is not shiny, it is not pretty. It is not painted. It is not polished. [. . .] All that pretty, shiny stuff does not have the character of the stuff that I am working with.”
With the help of a grant from The Sara Giles Moore Foundation, the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Art Conservation Center (AACC) are working together to survey all works in the collection and conserve those in need of treatment. One of the works to receive treatment was Blown Out Black Mama’s Belly (1994) by Lonnie Holley. This multimedia sculpture is made from the inner tube of an old truck tire, with a textile strip fastened at the top and multicolored fabric tied around the bottom, forming the outline of a female figure whose umbilical cord spills out onto the floor. Though these used and unusual materials, typical of Holley’s practice, present a challenge to conservators, they also, in an intentional and provocative way, comment on the life of the artist himself.
Lonnie Holley is an internationally acclaimed visual and performing artist from Birmingham, Alabama, who has lived and worked in Atlanta for the past thirty years. He is known for transforming discarded materials into multimedia sculptures that speak to the promises of second chances in art and life. Holley’s life especially has been characterized by rebounds from brushes with cruel fate. As a child, he was sent to the infamous Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children outside of Montgomery and forced to perform hard labor under armed guard until his grandmother eventually got him released (his story is the subject of the recent award-winning podcast Unreformed).
By the time he was thirty, Holley began making his first sculptures, initially using sandstone — which earned him the nickname “The Sandman” — and later other discarded materials, a practice of salvage he had learned from his grandmother. Over the years, he installed his artworks in a large outdoor art environment, which caught the attention of gallerists and scholars before it was destroyed when the city of Birmingham condemned his land to expand its airport.
Undeterred, Holley has spent the last fifty years expressing his artistic talents across a variety of media, and his work is now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many others. The High has the largest museum holding of Holley’s work, including over a dozen works, and has raised the baseline for approaches to conserving his and other self-taught artists’ work.
Holley knows that the materials he uses in his art making — rusted metal, old car parts, splintered wood, dirty cloth — are anything but traditional. Though you may be wondering why you’re looking at a used rubber tire and some tattered fabric, Holley’s artworks are visually arresting and perhaps more fascinating for the way they destabilize the values of the viewer, asking us to see the powerful relationship between an artwork’s meaning and its material basis. Not only do these materials imbue the work with a compelling message of renewal, but they also say something about their maker, whose life story is reflected in the life cycle of society’s scrap metal. “I had been thrown away as a child,” says Holley, “and here I was building something out of unwanted things.”
Often, Holley assembles these unwanted things to form a human figure, as he does in Blown Out Black Mama’s Belly, which assumes the form of a woman who has given birth. Visible on the tire’s surface are the old air valve, representing the belly button, and a two-inch slit just below it, a “wound to the womb” — already present when Holley found the tire — which lays bare the physical toll of childbirth and dramatizes the demands made on the Black female body. As Holley explains, “That piece of rubber . . . that was honoring my mama, because I thought about my mom’s children, and all the children that she has had.”
Like the bodies it represents, Blown Out Black Mama’s Belly visibly foregrounds its own past lives. Mileage and wear have left their mark on the rubber and textile that comprise this piece, creating a work of art whose subject and material composition are meaningfully aligned. So how did we preserve a piece made from media that were degrading even before they became part of the artwork?
This question may seem very specific to Holley’s work, but it is increasingly relevant as many artists — regardless of their training or access to resources — have embraced nontraditional materials over the course of the last century. For decades, museums were reticent about collecting the work of many self-taught artists because of the potentially unstable materials they employed, a trend that has recently begun to change. “One of the things that was keeping our work out of the museums,” Holley has noted, “was that we was working on materials that they thought were not preservable.”
Dirt and dust have been with the piece from the beginning, reminding viewers of how the toll of time and use influences our perception of an artwork. As these features are integral to our understanding of the piece, conservators retained what they considered “original” to the work of art, removing only dust that had accumulated on the surface, which is common with objects across the collection. With nontraditional materials, it can be difficult to determine what counts as “original.” Some conservators, in addition to conducting their own careful examination and running chemical tests, partner with curators — whose research informs the treatment and understanding of the object — and, if possible, with the artists themselves.
Conservators must carefully balance priorities in their handling of objects, striving to maintain the history of the piece while ensuring that it is structurally sound for longer-term survival. While nontraditional materials imbue the artwork with powerful meaning, they also bring their compromised condition, which can undermine the structural integrity of the piece. All art objects, from oil paintings and watercolors to wooden furniture and marble statues, are in a constant state of deterioration, but some materials degrade more quickly (and in more unexpected ways) than others. The rubber of the tire, having already covered thousands of miles of asphalt before it was manipulated by the artist, has become increasingly brittle over the course of the thirty years since the sculpture was made, and tiny cracks are visible across its surface. Furthermore, the wire that binds the top of the tire to the fabric “head” of the piece began to cut into the rubber, creating a large gash that threatened the work’s stability. The High had previously attempted to fix this issue by inserting a padded dowel in the curve of the tire to minimize stress, a low-impact stopgap measure that did not ensure long-term stability.
Instead of further padding the upper section of the tire, conservators targeted the undulating structure of the tire in the hopes of removing pressure from the top of the piece. Associate objects conservator Lindsay Ryder at AACC created a custom support, shaving four pieces of foam to fit the curves of the tire and covering them in synthetic fabric, which serves as a barrier between artwork and support while also enhancing its sturdiness. Not only do these foam inserts remove pressure from the degrading top of the work, but they also help prevent further cracking throughout the already brittle tire. To safely put the work on view, the conservation team used a custom platform and the wall for additional support, meaning that the loop fabric at the top hanging from a nail, which had long held the piece up, no longer bears weight.
This approach exemplifies how conservators can stabilize artworks not only through cleaning and chemical-based treatments but also with external, customized mounts. The way that the mounts nestle into the wave-like body of the piece also offers a kind of poetry that is in keeping with Holley’s pathos-driven practice. Bracing this abstracted female torso, they become an analogy for the kind of care and support every laboring woman should have and which Holley’s mother — and so many other Black women who experience systemic discrimination in the American healthcare system — do not receive. Propped up on the wall and resting on a platform that will help distance visitors from touching or accidentally treading on the piece, the work is able to be safely displayed, scars and all.
To see more of the conservation process, check out the video below.
