Ronald Lockett
Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die:
The Studio Education of the Junk House
April 13–May 28, 2023
MARCH is pleased to present Something That Has Lived Can Never Really Die: The Studio Education of the Junk House, an exhibition of assemblages and paintings by Ronald Lockett. Divided between the gallery’s two spaces, the fourteen paintings installed here provide the viewer with a cursory view of the artist at the height of his powers.
A Black deer wanders alone in a sparse forest, its body pierced by nails and metal fencing, led only by instinct and the dim light of a painted moon. The year is 1991 and David Lockett, the artist’s brother, has been captured at the onset of a new war, seven thousand miles away in Iraq. Powerless, but not without an implicit understanding of survival, Ronald Lockett articulates a desperate prayer in the form of a painting—a guiding force and talisman for his brother’s safe return—an Instinct for Survival…read more
“My artwork is a part of me, whether it’s good or bad, whether people like it, it’s a part of what I do from the heart. I care about my artwork and you know, like I say, it’s a way of getting back in touch with myself when I seem to lose my way… I regain who I am.”
–Ronald Lockett
Ronald Lockett
Rebirth, c. 1989
Enamel with Splash Zone on wood panel
48 1/2 x 97 x 2 inches
Ronald Lockett with Lonnie Holley, Babatunde Lawal, and Roy Blount Jr. Photo by William Arnett. Courtesy of the Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC Chapel Hill.
Ronald Lockett
Escape, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, branches on wood panel
48 x 48 x 1/2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, branches on wood panel
48 x 48 x 1/2 inches
“The theme of entrapment, which relates to both the artist’s concern for the environment and his own struggles with racism, became central for him in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The wall-hung Traps consist of delicate renderings of animals collaged over with sticks and sections of chain-link fencing. The image of a deer predominates, a kind of avatar.”
–David Ebony, Art in America
Ronald Lockett
Traps, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, chain link fencing, branches on wood
48 x 71 1/2 x 1/2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die, 1996
Wood, enamel, graphite, tin, found materials, and industrial sealing compound on wood
57 x 50 1/2 x 4 inches
Collection of the High Museum of Art
Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio
Ronald Lockett
Traps, 1994
Enamel, barbed wire, metal on metal sheeting
56 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 11 inches
“Lockett’s use of the deer, does, and bucks has been read in relationship to ideals of love and vulnerability. For example, Bernard L. Herman describes the untitled image of two deer as “at once a commentary on the protective nature of compassionate love, the limits of freedom, the struggle to escape, and in the skeletal and fleshed out create, the sense of mortality.” Love–its aspirations and impossibilities–are at once an attempt to reach beyond the self and a recognition of our ultimate total solitude.”
–Thomas (T.) Jean Lax & Katherine L. Jentleson
Ronald Lockett
Instinct for Survival, 1991
Enamel and wire on wood panel
48 x 48 x 2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Instinct for Survival, 1991
Chicken wire, wood, industrial sealing compound, enamel on wood
48 x 68 inches
Collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem
Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Ronald Lockett
Winter Snow, 1990
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 47 1/2 x 2 inches
Lonnie Holley (left) and Ronald Lockett (right), photo by William Arnett.
“One of the most radical and interesting aspects of Lockett’s career was his refusal to leave Bessemer to attend art school in the late 1980s, choosing instead to shadow the then-unknown artist Thornton Dial…
…Lockett often hung around the junk house, as Dial’s studio was known, and in choosing to remain in–rather than migrate from–the Deep South, Lockett made a powerful statement about the artistic significance of Bessemer.”
–Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
Ronald Lockett
Smoke Filled Sky, c. 1989
Enamel, found wood on panel
48 x 50 x 2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Holocaust, c. 1989
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 48 inches
Ronald Lockett
Rebirth, 1987
Wire, nails, and paint on Masonite
12 x 18.5 inches
Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Ronald Lockett
Rebirth, 1990
Oil, enamel, metal on wood panel
36 x 36 inches
A detail of Ronald Lockett, Untitled, c. 1989, enamel and oil on wood, 48 x 48 inches.
Ronald Lockett
Hiding Places, c. 1990
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 32 1/2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1989
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 24 inches
Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1989
Enamel and oil on wood
48 x 48 inches
“Emotionally raw and politically trenchant.”
–Ken Johnson, The New York Times
Ronald Lockett
England’s Rose, 1997
Enamel on metal, wood panel
48 x 48 x 2 inches
Ronald Lockett
Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die:
The Studio Education of the Junk House
April 13–May 28, 2023
A Wounded Deer—leaps highest—
I’ve heard the Hunter tell—
‘Tis but the Ecstasy of death—
And then the Brake is still!
–Emily Dickinson
A Black deer wanders alone in a sparse forest, its body pierced by nails and metal fencing, led only by instinct and the dim light of a painted moon. The year is 1991 and David Lockett, the artist’s brother, has been captured at the onset of a new war, seven thousand miles away in Iraq. Powerless, but not without an implicit understanding of survival, Ronald Lockett articulates a desperate prayer in the form of a painting—a guiding force and talisman for his brother’s safe return—an Instinct for Survival.
Lockett created dozens of works employing the symbol of the deer in the first years of his artistic life, a creative avatar to express the complicated realities of his existence in Bessemer’s Pipe Shop. Deer are virile, noble, and stealthy, but also gentle, delicate, and unusually attuned to their surroundings. Their senses are heightened: they see better; they hear better. They are hunted by all. During the life of a buck, his antlers are shed only to grow again. In this regard, they are symbols of regeneration, of rebirth. Buck also happened to be the nickname of the artist’s older cousin and artistic mentor, Thornton “Buck” Dial who provided Lockett with both inspiration and creative refuge at a formative moment in the young man’s life.
In 1987, Ronald Lockett made the life-affirming decision to forgo a formal art school education and work alongside Dial in the studio affectionately and strategically called the junk house, a ramshackle outbuilding behind Dial’s home. It is here that Lockett developed his visual language: deer, wolves, antelope, bison, and other endangered animals—potent symbols of nature’s majesty but also man’s cruelty—are joined by three-dimensional meditations on the Holocaust, the activities of the Klan, the Oklahoma City Bombing and other mass tragedies. Menace and threat are counterbalanced by utopian visions, metaphor-laden self-portraits, and the omnipresent potential of rebirth.
Ronald Lockett (1965-1998) was slight of build and sentient to the point of grace. He grew up in the wilds of post-industrial Bessemer, Alabama where he lived with his mother until her death and remained in his childhood home until his own untimely demise, the result of AIDS-related illness. The basic circumstances of his life are important to note as the artist never spent more than a few weeks away from his childhood home but was able to mine far-flung histories, both personal and shared, with deference and aplomb. Lockett, somewhat precariously, existed in a historical crossroads between two generations, after the great mid-century social movements had ended and just before the dominance of urban culture and television. He was a unique talent, influenced equally by Dial and Bob Ross, who he watched paint on television, incorporating some of the celebrity’s techniques into his own work.
Ronald Lockett: Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die: The Studio Education of the Junk House is divided between the gallery’s two spaces representing the yin and yang of being: night and day, tragedy and triumph, suffering and redemption, death and resurrection. Despite an overwhelming sense of being trapped, he was able to imbue his work with unrelenting sensitivity and depth through visual moorings to a much larger world. The fourteen paintings installed here provide the viewer with a cursory view of the artist at the height of his powers. All attest to the fundamental nature of man, alone in the wilderness, beguiled in equal measure by threat and beauty—an open prayer to the void.

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Ronald Lockett
Escape, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, branches on wood panel
48 x 48 x 1/2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, branches on wood panel
48 x 48 x 1/2 inches

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Traps, c. 1990
Oil, enamel, metal, chain link fencing, branches on wood
48 x 71 1/2 x 1/2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Traps, 1994
Enamel, barbed wire, metal on metal sheeting
56 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 11 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Instinct for Survival, 1991
Enamel and wire on wood panel
48 x 48 x 2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Winter Snow, 1990
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 47 1/2 x 2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Holocaust, c. 1989
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 48 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Rebirth, 1990
Oil, enamel, metal on wood panel
36 x 36 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Hiding Places, c. 1990
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 32 1/2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1989
Enamel on wood panel
48 x 24 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Rebirth, c. 1989
Enamel with Splash Zone on wood panel
48 1/2 x 97 x 2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
England’s Rose, 1997
Enamel on metal, wood panel
48 x 48 x 2 inches

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Ronald Lockett
Untitled, c. 1989
Enamel and oil on wood
48 x 48 inches