Look closer, though, and see the nails stuck into the hose. Then read the title card: The sculpture, we’re told, references the hoses and police dogs that notorious racist cop Bull Connor sicced on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama in the ‘60s. Holley wanted to render the hoses “powerless.”
But there’s yet another dimension: The description notes that the chairs have been stripped of their upholstery; Holley is “rhetorically questioning whether his life would have been less traumatic had he not been born with his skin color.”
The muscularity of the materials and the dynamics of the assemblage are enough to stop you in your tracks when you see “Without Skin.” But when you know the backstory and the many layers of thought and history that inform it, its power is amplified.
That experience happens over and over in “Never the Same Song,” a joint exhibition of Holley and Lizzi Bougatsos at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg that closes on Sept. 15. The artists are longtime collaborators who come from widely divergent backgrounds. Both transform found objects into artworks that are arresting in their own right, but also reveal layers of meaning reflecting their respective family histories and their acute awareness of the world around them.
Go to “Never the Same Song” to see the art, but be prepared to read about it, too. The co-curators, Viva Vadim and the MFA’s Katherine Pill, have done a beautiful job not just coordinating the installation but providing valuable context.
Here’s a bit of it.
Holley, 74, grew up in Birmingham, where, Vadim told reporters when the show opened in May, he was taken from his family when he was a child, “physically abused, forced to pick cotton, and pronounced brain-dead as a result of being hit by a car.” His skill at salvage, “born out of necessity,” became his superpower. It allowed him to transform throwaways—whether a pile of scrap metal or a second-hand Casio keyboard—into the stuff of an international career in art and music. But he has also been driven by memories of loss—including the death of family members by fire—and the need to protect the natural environment from the ravages of industry.
Bougatsos, 50, grew up in Queens, New York, the daughter of a cobbler. “Witnessing her father’s dedication to his trade, repairing and revivifying shoes,” says Vadim, “taught her the significance of caring for things others might cast off or overlook.” In her youth, she studied ballet, introducing her to a theme she would continue to explore in her art: the simultaneity of beauty and pain. Included in “Never the Same Song” are pieces that both honor and critique her experience with dance, as in “Compartmentalized,” in which slats of “a drawer from family-built furniture” seem to be crushing or perhaps imprisoning a pair of her old ballet shoes.
Performance is integral to both artists’ creative lives. Bougatsos is the frontwoman of the experimental dream-pop band Gang Gang Dance. Holley, singing and playing keyboards in primarily improvisational mode, has gained increasing prominence as a recording artist. His fourth album, Oh Me Oh My, was named one of Paste magazine’s top 10 albums of 2023.
The exhibition offers telling glimpses into the artists as performers. You can envelop yourself in the mesmerizing video “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” which incorporates Holley’s music and sculptures into a so-called “sci-fi documentary” co-directed by Holley and Cyrus Moussavi. And you can vicariously experience one of Bougatsos’ most indelible performances, when during a protest gone wrong in 2001 she accidentally set herself on fire.
Photo c/o MFA St. Pete. Design by Joe Frontel
Lonnie Holley’s 'Without Skin' packs a wallop.
Several pieces evoke that event and its aftermath. “The Pillar” includes the compression pants she wore during recovery from the burns. “The Opera,” a collage of bandages, looks like patches of skin in a red velvet-lined box. In “Idolize the Burn,” a brass chandelier lies askew atop a pedestal, a pair of resin-dipped toe shoes hanging from one arm.
Combining found objects, personal history and the memory of flames, “Idolize the Burn” encapsulates the connections between these two artists. In the next gallery, Holley’s “Cautiously Rewired” memorializes the loss of his young niece and nephew in an electrical fire caused by faulty wiring. A chaotic assemblage of scrap metal, wood, wire and electrical components, it fairly screams in anger. In keeping with so much of the exhibition, it’s also a reminder of the environmental injustice so often inflicted upon marginalized communities and people of color.
That’s not to say this is a show without humor. Consider Holley’s “Watering Myself the Best I Can,” a duo of watering cans that circle in on themselves, or Bougatsos’ trash bag full of “Ice Sculpture Water,” collected after a performance with an ice sculpture in 2022.
Nor is it without beauty. The MFA’s installation is rich in eloquent lighting and smart juxtaposition. Holley’s haunting “The Unidentified Laborers,” a stand of seven pitchforks of varying heights, evokes the unseen enslaved people who worked our farms, lit such that the shadows of the pitchforks suggest the ghosts of many more. The verticality of the piece is echoed in that of its elegant neighbor, Bougatsos’ “YOKO/Goodbye Love,” in which a black and white dress hangs next to a long red slash of fabric.
There’s a story behind that, of course. You might hear it from the artist herself, when she takes part in a talk with curator Viva Vadim on the closing day of the show, Sept. 15. But try to get to the exhibition before that. It has so many stories to tell.
Tickets for the "Never The Same Song" artist and curator talk with Lizzi Bougatsos and Viva Vadim happening Sunday, Sept. 15 at 1 p.m. inside MFA St. Pete's Marly Room are included with the cost of museum admission.
Fun fact about Vadim: Holley began his recording career at the urging of her father, Matt Arnett, whose own father was an influential collector of African American art who collected Holley’s work. Her mother is Vanessa Vadim, daughter of Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim. So yup, Jane Fonda’s her grandma.
