Ronald Lockett

American, 1965–1998

Biographyborn 1965, Bessemer, Alabama;

A relative and neighbor of Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett spent much of his youth observing the older artist at work. Lockett's consuming passion has always been drawing; after graduating from high school in the early 1980s, he stayed at home drawing pictures and tending to his mother, who was in fragile health, and his great aunt, Sarah Dial Lockett, who also raised Thornton Dial and lived in the house between the two artists' homes.

Lockett's other primary source is television, especially nature documentaries and the news. The naturalism of Lockett's style differs from other artists of the Dial family, yet he shares with them an interest in art as social commentary, the use of animals as surrogates for humans, and a reliance on the expressiveness of found materials. Some of Lockett's oldest surviving drawings are on the sides of tin outbuildings in his neighborhood. He frequently scavenges abandoned tin shacks and barns for their decrepit siding, from which he fashions nailed-together montages. These unpainted works invoke the legacies of quiltmaking and folk architecture as a means of contemplating historical continuities and changes, including environmental and biological threats and the psychological diseases of racism and violence.

Person TypePerson