Drought, 1994

Ronald Lockett (1965-1998), who lived in Bessemer, Alabama near his older cousin and artistic mentor Thornton Dial, experimented with various media and techniques throughout his short career. In 1992 or 1993, he began working with rusted sheet metal, using the monochromatic material as figure and ground, perforating his surfaces to create mass from negative space. By his death at age 32, the artist had created a body of work that considered memorialization on personal and large-scale levels; his pieces ranged in subject from his weakening body to national tragedy (including a series about the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City) to the disappearing natural world. In Drought, a stag seeks water in a barren landscape; the lost animal embodies Lockett’s longstanding concerns of ephemerality, destruction and memory.

A major retrospective of Lockett's work, Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett, will open at the American Folk Art Museum in New York on 21 June 2016 and travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The exhibition will be accompanied by a significant scholarly catalogue.