In 1981, after he brought a few of his sandstone carvings to then-Birmingham Museum of Art director Richard Murray, the latter helped to promote his work.

[3] His albums are Just Before Music (2012), Keeping a Record of It (2013), MITH (2018), National Freedom (2020), Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a collaboration with Matthew E. White (2021), and Oh Me Oh My (2023).

[2][4] From the age of five, Holley worked various jobs: picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, and cooking.

Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones, Jr., in his review of the show singled out Holley's work writing, “Enter through a front yard re-created right down to the dirt floor, but a yard transformed, with broken tombstones, sprinkler heads, bedsprings, paintings, baby-doll parts—and all of it rejiggered by artist Lonnie Holley into a phantasmagorical vision as surreptitiously coherent as a dream.

[4] He rejected the airport authority's offer to buy the property at the market rate of $14,000; knowing that his site-specific installation had personal and artistic value, he demanded $250,000.

The dispute went to probate court, and in 1997 a settlement was reached and the airport authority paid $165,700 to move Holley's family and work to a larger property in Harpersville, Alabama.

The creation of the work was documented in the film The Sandman's Garden by Arthur Crenshaw and in photographs by Alice Faye "Sister" Love.

[8] His work was also included in the 2014 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, "When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South" which also featured the work of Kevin Beasley, Beverly Buchanan, Henry Ray Clark, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, Theaster Gates, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Bessie Harvey, David Hammons, Ralph Lemon, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney McMillian, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Marie “Big Mama” Roseman, Jacolby and Patricia Satterwhite, Xaviera Simmons, Georgia Speller, Henry Speller, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Geo Wyeth, and others.

In 2022, Holley was named a Fellow and received an unrestricted cash award from United States Artists (USA), a Chicago-based arts funding organization.

Other artists represented include Dial, sculptors Ralph Griffin, Bessie Harvey, and Joe Minter, painters Joe Light and Mary T. Smith, and artists Ronald Lockett, Mose Tolliver, and Purvis Young, and Gee's Bend quilt associates Jessie T. Pettway and Annie Mae Young.

"[12] In 2018, his work was part of the exhibition "History Refused to Die" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary Black artists from the American South.

[27] In April 2021, Holley released a collaboration album with Matthew E. White titled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection.