Lonnie Holley made his first artwork at age twenty-nine, carving a sculpture out of industrial sandstone—a byproduct of the steel manufacturing plants in his community—to place on the graves of his sister’s two children, who died in a house fire. Holley then began painting and making sculptural assemblages out of objects he found around his home and studio in Birmingham, Alabama. In African in a Cage Gasping for Air, which features a dashiki and gas mask in a chicken-wire cage, Holley engages with a rich tradition of Black vernacular culture in which cast-off objects are reclaimed and transformed into installations that address slavery, environmental racism, and incarceration.