News & Events

“James ‘Son Ford’ Thomas: The Devil and His Blues” at New York University’s 80WSE Gallery is an inspirational show about the perseverance of art, and the tragedy of inequality. But it is also a thing of joy: It brings the work of a wonderful and underappreciated artist to the fore.

"I'm gonna get your garbage, your trash, your debris," Lonnie Holley says before a crowd gathered to hear him perform at the American Folk Art Museum as part of the ongoing exhibition "When the Curtain Never Comes Down."

In New York this week, at a posh Wall Street restaurant where Pharrell Williams sang for celebrities invited by Alicia Keys and Karl Lagerfeld, actor Hill Harper introduced a special honoree: Bessemer artist Thornton Dial.

And back home, the people said . . . who?

Is Bill Arnett enjoying the last laugh?

For five decades, the Atlanta-based writer, curator, and collector has researched and collected a vast array of art forms from around the world. During the latter part of his career, he has given particular attention to a diverse body of formerly overlooked artworks from his home region, the Deep South of the United States. Currently, Arnett and his collaborators are enjoying a moment of satisfaction and recognition—call it a moment of vindication—most of them never dreamed they would ever see.

One afternoon last week, as pre-Thanksgiving snow whitened Central Park, Sheena Wagstaff was in her office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she chairs the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, reflecting on a major gift that the Met had just accepted: fifty-seven paintings, drawings, mixed-media pieces, and quilts by thirty African-American artists from the South.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Monday that it had received a major gift of 20th-century works by African-American artists from the South, including 10 pieces by Thornton Dial and 20 important quilts made by the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that 57 works by contemporary African American artists from the Southern United States have been donated to the Museum by the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from its William S. Arnett Collection. In addition to paintings, drawings, and mixed media works by acclaimed artists such as Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and Nellie Mae Rowe, the major gift includes 20 important quilts dating from the 1930s to 2003 that were created by women artists based in the area around Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

One night in October, just a couple blocks from Harvard Square, a young crowd gathered at a music space called the Sinclair to catch a performance by Bill Callahan, the meticulous indie-rock lyricist who has been playing to bookish collegiate types since the early ‘90s. Callahan’s opening act, Lonnie Holley, had been playing to similar audiences for two years. A number of details about Holley made this fact surprising: He was decades older than just about everyone in the club and one of the few African-Americans. He says he grew up the seventh of 27 children in Jim Crow-era Alabama, where his schooling stopped around seventh grade. In his own, possibly unreliable telling, he says the woman who informally adopted him as an infant eventually traded him to another family for a pint of whiskey when he was 4.

"... a free jazz fever dream from the deep South, a babbling Baptist sermon from deep space, a lullaby for the end of the world, a songbook that’s frequently beautiful and occasionally frightening."