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From the Archives: Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr with Outsider Artists
donna ferrato
Jan 18, 2016
This short story features Joe Minter, Lonnie Holley, and their greatest champion, Jane Fonda. I was working with writer Claudia G Dowling, on assignment for Talk Magazine, which folded before the story could be published.
Joe Minter's home in Birmingham, Alabama, is right up the hill from Martin Luther King Jr Drive. In his front yard where I took his photograph he displays what he calls an "African Village in America," as well as a toilet dedicated to the 1960s civil rights movement. His home rests on two historically black burial grounds. As Joe says, "We are in the presence of about 100,000 African ancestors."
Lonnie Holley, also photographed in Birmingham, is what the New York Times calls the "insider's outsider artist." Originally an visual artist, now he travels the world performing with his voice and the emotions that come from the life of a black man growing up in Jim Crow-era America, traded to another family for a bottle of whiskey at age four. Collector Bill Arnett states "if Lonnie had been living in the East Village 30 years ago and been white, he'd be famous by now."
