A seated nude of ambiguous gender, fashioned from strips of rusted tin, floats in an expanse of the same distressed metal. Titled Fever Within, this image was made by Ronald Lockett (1965–1998) in 1995, three years before his death from AIDS-related causes. Born into a close-knit extended family in the declining industrial city of Bessemer, Alabama, Lockett was one of a network of local artists that included his cousin and mentor, Thornton Dial (1928–2016), and his friend Lonnie Holley. Without formal training (in Lockett’s case, deliberately so) and working largely with found materials, Lockett, Dial, Holley and peers like Joe Minter took their visual language from traditional black Southern vernacular art forms like the scrap quilt and the yard show but adapted it to speak of personal philosophies, social issues and the African-American experience.