The Parrish Art Museum presents a special live-stream evening of conversation and performance with visual artist, musician, filmmaker, and educator Lonnie Holley. Throughout the program, Holley will be in conversation with Chief Curator Alicia Longwell, play the keyboard and sing, and will be accompanied by Washington Duke on drums/percussion.

Holley, whose exhibition, Everything That Wasn’t White: Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House, will be on view at the Parrish from April 24-September 6, was a recent Artist-in-Residence at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, NY. He did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley’s original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley’s music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation.

Holley’s artwork has most recently been in exhibitions at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and MASS MoCA. In September of 2018, he released his third studio album, MITH, on Jagjaguwar. The album made numerous “best of” year-end lists, including those of the New Yorker and Newsweek. His first film, I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, premiered in 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival.

About Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley was born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama. From the age of five, he worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking. He lived with foster parents in a whiskey house, boarded on one side by the state fairgrounds and on another by a drive-in movie theater, until the age of eleven, when he was picked up by the Birmingham Police Department for violating the city-wide curfew, imposed during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He was sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, which was little more than a slave camp for African American youth. His early life was chaotic, to say the least, and Holley was never afforded the pleasure of a real childhood. After his birth family discovered his whereabouts, he returned to Birmingham to live with his paternal grandmother. For the next ten years he would have a series of jobs, which included working for the Campbell Soup Company picking vegetables, working as a greenskeeper at a Country Club in Florida, and working as a chef at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando when it opened. He returned to Birmingham in his early 20s.

Since 1979, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, filmmaking, printmaking, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events. His work is now in collections of major museums throughout the country, on permanent display in the United Nations, and have been displayed in the White House Rose Garden.

Since 2010, he has lived and worked out of Atlanta, Georgia.

About Washington Duke
Playing drums seemed to come naturally to Washington (Washy) Duke. At the age of ten, his first music teacher gave him a drum kit, and mastering the instrument became a lifelong pursuit. By thirteen years old, Washy had a band, covering Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix at friends’ birthday parties. At eighteen, he was recruited by Dr. Paul Jeffrey to come to Duke University to play drums in the Jazz Ensemble. Jeffrey noticed an innate musicality to Washy’s playing, and hired him to play in his own quartet, even though Jazz was still a foreign idiom to Washy. But, having been a protégé of Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, Jeffrey took a sink or swim approach, and gave Washy most of his education on the bandstand. In his first year at Duke, Washy performed with Jazz greats John Stubblefield, Walter Bishop Jr., Ray Bryant, and Curtis Fuller. At the end of that year, Jeffrey and Fuller asked Washy to come to France and record on their album, Together in Monaco. Washy was nineteen years old. He has since gone on to study with legendary drummer and teacher Michael Carvin and has spent the better part of the last twenty years as a drummer and bandleader for numerous acts across all genres of popular music. 2020 made performing nearly impossible, but Washy used the time to practice daily, and return to his study of the art of drumming.

Friday Nights are made possible, in part, by Presenting Sponsor:
Additional support provided by Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder.