Ronald Lockett

"Despite the stylistic influences of the Western painting tradition, his art could hardly be more vernacular, for in at least five crucial ways he reconfigured traditional African American beliefs and practices. First, he used animals as the protagonists in his allegories in a manner that recontextualizes but is consistent with the roles of animals in nineteenth-century trickster tales and fables. Second, he used African American conjurational materials—blackness, rust, wire, poison, smoke—as the theme or physical medium for his works. Third, his preoccupation with instances of psychological transformation reflected a broadly vernacular emphasis on cathartic and ecstatic religious and performance rituals. Fourth, he was intensely concerned with eschatology—last or final things: a foundation of Afro-Christian theology. Fifth, he partook of the hermeneutic approaches of the root sculptor or the preacher, both of which seek prophetic signs in the found nature of a text—whether that text be the earth or the Bible—as a starting point for the communication of wisdom to others."

Lockett was born and raised in the Pipe Shop neighborhood of Bessemer, Alabama. Since childhood, Lockett knew that he wanted to be an artist, and he grew up under the mentor ship of his uncle and artist, Thornton Dial. Lockett was one of five children, four boys and one girl, born to Betty and "Short" Lockett. His father, known as "Short" or "Little Bud," left Betty and their children when Lockett was a young child. Betty suffered from degenerating mental health thereafter, which haunted her until her death in the mid 1990s.

Coming-of-age after the Civil Rights movement, and dying before the novels of the 21st century, Lockett was stuck in a socio-cultural limbo. His work shows the simultaneous fight and purgatory of growing up a black male in the 1980s in rural Alabama. Watching his cousin, Thornton Dial, wrestle with current events and American history, such as the Iraq war and American slavery, Lockett also brought his own position in history to his work.

Ronald Lockett (1965 — 1998) was an American visual artist, combining painting with three dimensional objects. “Lockett's primary artistic mentor” was the painter Thornton Dial, his cousin. In describing his work, Holland wrote of the influences of “blackness in relation to HIV/AIDS, LGBT life, nationalism, and the racial implications of terms such as "outsider," "self-taught," and "folk" in American art”. His work has been shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ackland Art Museum, and The American Folk Art Museum.