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At the age of 63, Lonnie Holley is finally a rock star—at least for the moment. On a Thursday afternoon, he and his longtime friend, advocate and de facto tour manager Matt Arnett have stopped at the Community Grounds Café, a coffee shop in South Atlanta that doubles as a community center. They’re seeking some quiet in the mile and a half between their respective homes, and this, Arnett says, is a good place to find it. 

An unmarked brick warehouse on the west side of Atlanta has become the repository for some fifteen hundred works by more than a hundred African-American artists. Supervised by a seventy-four-year-old white man named Bill Arnett, it is the world’s most comprehensive collection of art made by untrained black Southerners. The warehouse, at first glance, may call to mind a salvage yard, for the artists used whatever materials were available to them: rocks, chains, clothes, rope, bedsprings, scrap metal, blood.

For a long time, Joe Minter managed to share a yard with his wife, Hilda, their two sons and 100,000 of their neighbors. His scruffy three-bedroom house filled up most of a small city lot, just up the hill from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. But somehow he made it work. When these souls began to cry out for their own lawn ornaments, however, he realized he would have to find more room.

As he tells it, Lonnie Holley’s story of growing up poor in the south is nearly impossible to fathom, marked again and—almost routinely—again by trauma. But then, too, by art, as he built a career as a self-taught sculptor and painter of found objects. Last year, at 62, after decades of singing while he worked, Holley released his jarring debut album, Just Before Music, a marriage of improvised keys and the rambling, hollow bellow of his voice, as well as the first original recording put out by the archival folk label Dust-to-Digital. This year, he’ll tour, and he recently starred in a Whitney Museum group show, “Blues for Smoke.” Exclusive video from that mesmerizing performance is embedded below. Here, in an excerpt from a two-hour speakerphone conversation from Dust to Digital’s headquarters in Atlanta, Holley tells us where he comes from, and why that matters.

“Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” on display at the High Museum of Art through March 3, 2013, is the culmination of the 25-year rise to fame of an 84-year-old self-taught African-American artist whose origins, influences and originality all need to be reconsidered in a different intellectual framework. The categories of “folk art,” “contemporary art” and even “assemblage” and “conceptual art” do not serve us well any longer.

“Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” the newly opened exhibition at the High Museum of Art, commands seven galleries and all three floors of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing — a lot of valuable Peachtree Street real estate. Yet the display of 59 wall-mounted assemblages, free-standing sculptures and drawings form such a potent critique of social issues in America, and Dial is such a driven and prolific art-maker, one doesn’t doubt the 20-year retrospective could overtake another three stories.

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial” honored an American original. The self-taught Mr. Dial, born in 1928 in rural Alabama, invented a personal, vernacular approach to collage: aggressively articulated, expressively—and beautifully—colored constructions incorporating a startling assortment of scavenged materials. Two decades of relief paintings, free-standing sculptures and drawings attested to Mr. Dial’s power. Their titles asserted deep convictions about ecology, civil rights, the role of women, and politics; their quirky materiality declared their affinity with the oddball objects in Southern "yard shows,” but no special pleading was required for the art or its author. Whatever the works’ lineage or motivations, whatever Mr. Dial’s history, “Hard Truths” was an impressive survey of first-rate works by a major artist. Period.

In 1987, a remarkably prescient conversation occurred between Alabama artist Thornton Dial and Atlanta art historian/patron Bill Arnett soon after they met. Arnett said, “Mr. Dial, people value cultures according to how well they make art, and nobody believes black Americans are capable of making great art. You can become one of the most important artists in the world and make everybody realize they were wrong. You can open doors to so many people like yourself who’ve been kept out. You can bring civil rights to people in ways that Martin Luther King didn’t live to do.”

Dial responded, “Man, if I’m that good they’ll have to kill me.”

The works in “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, are tough, beautiful, disturbing, seductive, improvisatory, unignorable, fierce, exhilarating, ambiguous—and much more. They are also difficult to write about. The intense physicality and raw power of Mr. Dial’s enormous, confrontational collages and constructions, built from a staggering range of salvaged objects, resist description. Reproductions—even carefully chosen, artfully framed detailsonly hint at the fascination exerted by the dense surfaces of Mr. Dial’s most engaging creations. Words, including the string of adjectives above, seem superfluous; the best response would be to point in silence at these wonderful works.