Lonnie Bradley Holley was born in Birmingham in 1950, the seventh of twenty-seven children.  He spent much of his childhood in and out of foster homes and state institutions.  He was adopted by his natural grandmother when he was 14, but ran away and spent several years drifting around the South working usually as a short order cook.  He eventually settled in his hometown of Birmingham.  In 1979, two of Holley’s nieces died in a house fire, plunging Holley into a deep depression.  His family could not afford headstones for the children, so Holley channeled his grief into creating headstones out of sandstone.  These were Holley’s first works of art.  Holley then began to create an environment of his artworks out of found objects and sandstone sculptures in the yard at his home in Birmingham.  By 1981, Holley’s art had come to the attention of the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution which included him in the exhibition “More Than Land and Sky: Art From Appalachia” at the Museum of American Art in Washington.  In 1997, Holley lost his art environment when the Birmingham Airport Authority declared imminent domain over his property and bulldozed it for an airport expansion.  Holley then moved to Harpersville, Alabama, where he currently resides.