<div>The first major monograph on a multifaceted self-taught artist whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to performance and sound. Lonnie Holley's work has captivated audiences. "Lonnie Holley has held a cult status among the art cognoscenti for a long time as a visual artist and performer."--New York Times Lonnie Holley's widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry. After decades of making art, he is now getting the recognition he richly deserves. The artist's first sculptures were carved tombstones for his nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, a large all-encompassing outdoor installation that was eventually destroyed in 1997. The artist's work continued unabated as he began to gain recognition and exhibit his work in the South and throughout the US. In his first major monograph, every facet of his practice is explored. Holiday considers Holley's art and music as interconnected components of the artist's overall creative vision. Beardsley focuses on the artist's Birmingham roots connecting the cultural firmament of that city with other major creative communities in Alabama, most notably Boykin, more popularly known as Gee's Bend, home of the famous quilters.</div>

Lonnie Holley

Arts & Photography

Beardsley, John

Holiday, Harmony

History & Criticism

Rizzoli Electa

Holiday curates poems-as-text and image-as-impression, lyricism and activism. The "legacies" of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday and other icons collide, harnessing taboos they upheld triumphantly. Layers of a story coalesce in restricted space producing ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies.
The New Mythology Begins to Love me 
With an immediacy that seems at once artless and profoundly sophisticated. You know how Billie Holiday sounds vague and precise like an unmarked grave that might your father's but he had another name for his disappearance, he called it love eventfully shattered with enough of it
I heard black people don't get depressed, besides as luxury, and the bible says. What's popular now is the way the miracle of pure style cures or is it curses, crosses our heart, hopes to hide of what it don't get while new angels sing hexes into bottles of northern comfort. Uproar. Jesus, already these myths are obsolete too and fresh the cold details he was bleeding his twisted love into. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love.
Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (2011), won the Motherwell Prize. Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues, a "dos-a-dos" book featuring poetry, letters and essays, came out in late 2013. Holiday lives in Los Angeles.

Hollywood Forever

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Fence Books

Poetry. African American Studies. Music. UNCLE TOM, AMERICA'S FAVORITE NEGRO, IS DEAD. Championing the tenderest of homicidal tendencies, a penchant for mercy killings and redemptive rites of passage, A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM is exactly what it announces it is, a book as dynamic and eternal event wherein a feminine voice leads her band of improvisers in a procession of joyous interrogation and forgiveness. This ritual is simultaneously a purging of any cowardly impulses in the speaker and in the culture she addresses and speaks as, and a releasing or banishing of unfit archetypes, readying the landscape for fresh forces by torching the weakest links in the prevailing mythos. This book looks at the current state of the double and triple consciousness blackness in the West demands and situates its varied states and registers as chorus, as music, and call and response. In this way the book performs and reinvents a ritual, the Jazz Funeral, while offering a new perspective on letting go and rebirth cycles, a new path from bereavement to reprieve. Self-actualization is not only inevitable but fun in the context of A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM. We learn how he got over, how she got over, how a song of innocence turns into a mandate for the total renewal of the souls of black folk, and therefore of everyone--and we are given a songbook that assists in the releasing modes of existence we have outgrown, and lets us enjoy the process.

A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom

Birds, LLC

An archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture, produced alongside Harmony Holiday's first solo museum exhibition, Black Backstage. Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture--its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday's first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.

Life of the Party (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Music

Semiotext[e]

The second title in the Clarion series spotlights the artist Nikita Gale, whose multimedia work applies the lens of material culture to examine the role authority plays in political, social, and economic systems.\nImmersing the audience in sound and light, Nikita Gale’s END OF SUBJECT subverts understandings of viewership by prompting spectators to question their subjecthood within 52 Walker’s site-specific installation. Creating an aurally and visually rich environment, Gale engages with the architecture of the space, stimulating all senses, and muses on the boundaries of performance art. Considering and fracturing the physical space of the installation, the artist employs abolitionist ideology and institutional critique to simultaneously rupture and rebuild facets of the art institution.\nWith an introduction by Ebony L. Haynes and a suite of poems by Harmony Holiday, this publication considers Gale’s multidisciplinary approach in addressing historical hierarchies of visibility. A text by the esteemed artist Andrea Fraser offers reflections on the various interventions at play during a gathering held in the exhibition.\nAbout Clarion 
The Clarion series of illustrated publications is positioned as an extension of each exhibition at the groundbreaking gallery space 52 Walker, curated by Ebony L. Haynes. The program focuses on showcasing conceptual and research-based artists from a range of backgrounds and at various stages in their careers. The series title is derived from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the oldest of its kind, at the University of California, San Diego. Octavia Butler attended this workshop in the 1970s. Butler’s writing has been influential in the conceptual framework of the program and the Clarion series. With a sleek design influenced by encyclopedias, each publication features color reproductions of the works on view, alongside an introduction by Haynes, commissioned essays, artist texts, archival materials, and more.

Nikita Gale: End of Subject (Clarion)

Fraser, Andrea

Gale, Nikita

David Zwirner Books/52 Walker

From "Negro League Baseball":
Mother and Father and other frank nouns flow between freedoms in this stream of conscious dispersal. Rather than say they are musical say: They are music. I mean we say we mean it because it feels nice to mean anything-- it feels childlike a newborn lost in a beautiful cave on the way to behavior--It feels and fields and home and safe only saved, like a packet of foreign sugar back pocket cafe good nigger swagger—wait.
Harmony Holiday was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1982. Her father was Northern Soul singer Jimmy Holiday. She is an MFA student at Columbia University.

Negro League Baseball (Motherwell Prize)

Literary

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Harmony Holiday's tête-bêche book-length lyric essay collection GO FIND YOUR FATHER/A FAMOUS BLUES immerses itself and its readers in a deeply personal interrogation of perhaps the most difficult subjects of all: love and family legacy. Holiday addresses these topics in verse, prose, and, most affectingly, in letters to her father—the late singer-songwriter Jimmy Holiday. Through these notes as well as her poems bearing long, ambitious, uncompromising lines, Holiday explores how we distill our own identities from memories and responsibilities bound up in tenderness and violence. "Do any black children grow up casual? Naw, we grow up shipped, knowing that we are loved but knowing more than that, that terror, that knowing is scrawled money for our bank. We're sure-shot and avoided, singing blue devil blues like a black and blue disciple, out from Sallis, Attala off delta, change-played, flowed to that subcommon up-river fate, our Waterloo and phonic quarry, step-sharp, sharp-squared, strait- shawled, boot-sharp visitor, made for walking, talking remnant of an extra- impossible accord, then Los Angeles. Resonances and renascence of everywhere we come from, Harmony, deepest Holiday since Jason, since Jimmy, having gone to find him, makes these missive runs, assured of her allure but running from and in that into open, unsure dream. She sees it's getting late. Her archive has a microtonal blush. Sightsound, as Russell Atkins says. Can you say what it is to sing a song of love I can show you, right here, ask me now."—Fred Moten

Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues

Ricochet Editions

Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust. It echoes and transambulates the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress, without a system of naming our history, we become addicted to its ghosts of familiarity. Names are angels of mercy. That’s part of the reason for the title of this work, to help unleash this word and its healing components from obscurity. In the process the word came to life, I realized on a visceral level that it was gendered for me, that the erasure of trauma and the erasure of black femininity were happening simultaneously, even or especially within myself. This book seeks to unknot that through the writing of a black female epic hero, because as I started writing about the black feminine I couldn’t think of one explicit black female epic hero in the western canon, my Maafa had no relatives. We have characters, lots of tragic ones, lively ones, beautiful transcendent ones with heroic tendencies, but I don’t know of our black female hero in poetics who is as deliberately cast as Odysseus. It’s a large undertaking but this book sets out to write her, whose name is Maafa. She killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting something that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. The book begins in Duat, or what the egyptian Book of the Dead calls ‘the boat the carries the sun’ and moves toward ‘A Paradise of Ruins’ which is the last section, where our tragicomedic black female hero dances a series of poems as gestures, everything from the cut pitch of a single drum lick to the frenzied but detached look on memed faces to the way a dancer waves while walking backwards. Through the existential absurdity of the accumulation of these images she exorcises her own haunts, and Maafa is healed into complete being. It’s a book of poems about a kind of rebirth of feminine consciousness and cultural consciousness that was trapped in patriacracy and erasure.

Maafa

Maafa is an epic poem about reparations and the female body. Maafa undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity. Maafa has killed her father and been granted eternal life. 
Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust, and echoes the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress. Maafa killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero’s journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. Through an accumulation of images she exorcises her own haunts, and is healed into complete being.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Holiday, Harmony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Holiday, Harmony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Holiday, Harmony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lonnie Holley

Hollywood Forever

A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom

Life of the Party (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Nikita Gale: End of Subject (Clarion)

Negro League Baseball (Motherwell Prize)

Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues

Maafa

Maafa