Lonnie Holley came to art via tombstones. In 1979, when his sister lost two children in a house fire, Holley managed his grief by chipping away at stone, carving headstones for his niece and nephew’s graves. Afterward, he kept making sculptures and eventually began working with other materials, like wood, barbed wire, and animal bones. Despite their formal eclecticism, these pieces share a purpose: they suggest jagged totems for departed spirits. At the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, in the exhibition “Another Tradition: Drawings by Black Artists from the American South,” one of Holley’s assemblages acted as a conduit for the dead.