DOCSLIB.ORG

Joy Gregory, Claudette Johnson Taste of an Increasingly International and (Of Indian Origin) Sutapa Biswas, and Commercialised Art Scene

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Joy Gregory, Claudette Johnson Taste of an Increasingly International and (Of Indian Origin) Sutapa Biswas, and Commercialised Art Scene The Turner Prize 2017 - A Turning Point in the Public Recognition of Black British Women Artists? Ingrid von Rosenberg (TU Dresden/Berlin) Introduction: The Turner Prize and efore continuing, a word on my use of Black British Art Bthe term “black British”: I am using it here as the politically active artists in he Turner Prize, awarded since the 1970s and 1980s had done, namely T1984, is for the art world what the referring “to all those communities, of Booker is for the literary scene: the most whatever ethnic or ‘racial’ origin, who prestigious prize a contemporary British were regarded as ‘other’ – different – and visual artist can win. When on the thus racially excluded” (Hall, 2001a: evening of 5 December 2017 the winner 35). Though in theory covering all kinds of that year was announced in the Ferens of people, in practice the term meant Art Gallery, Hull (then UK City of black and Asian British citizens. Several Culture), it was a surprise to many British in that sense black British male artists art lovers and a great pleasure to those had won the Turner since the 1990s: who take a special interest in black art, sculptor Anish Kapoor in 1991, painter admiring its characteristic combination Chris Ofili in 1998, film maker Steve of a political stance with great artistic McQueen in 1999, while film maker talent. The winner was Lubaina Himid, Isaac Julien made it to the shortlist in 63 years old and a very active black 2001 and painter and installation artist British woman artist and curator since Yinka Shonibare in 2004. But only the 1980s. Two things were new that year: once, in 2013, a black woman arist was the age limit of 50 was removed, and the shortlisted: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye limitation to recent work was also lifted, was honoured for her timeless, fictional so that the lifelong development of the portraits of black subjects. This is competitors could be taken into account. surprising for two reasons: for one thing six white women before Himid had won Page 99 Hard Times 102 (2/2018) The Turner Prize 2017 - the prize, and for another quite a few A Bit of History: The Work and black British women artists had been Exhibition History of Black Women very productive since the 1980s. It seems Artists from the 1980s on that the naming of Himid has finally cleaned up with an unspoken prejudice: omen were involved in the that black women don’t make great art. Wsecond phase right from the start: in 1979 Marlene Smith joined n a seminal article Stuart Hall has three very young men, Donald Rodney, Idivided the history of black art in Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, in Britain into three phases, a pattern that founding the first political group of has meanwhile been taken over by other black artists in the UK, the legendary historians of art, e.g. by Eddie Chambers Blk Art Group. They were inspired by (Hall 2006, Chambers 2014). The first the American Black Art Movement phase is defined as covering the period (BAM) of the 1960s and 1970s, part from the 1940s to the 1980s, when fully of the Black Power Movement, and in trained black artists from all parts of the Britain there was also good reason for an Commonwealth came to the “mother artistic protest: in times of an economic country”, (falsely) assuming they would decline and under the influence of be welcomed as equals by the art scene. the National Front, Enoch Powell’s The second phase began in the 1980s, “Rivers of Blood Speech” and Thatcher’s when young artists, who – though not politics, racism and marginalisation had all born in the UK – had grown up there intensified and led to the first violent and were trained in British art schools, clashes since the late 1950s. Three came to the fore with a distinctly political years later, at the First National Black art programme. Lubaina Himid was one Convention in Wolverhampton in 1982, of them. The third phase, according to an impressive number of black women Hall, began in the 1990s with artists artists with the same experiences and a like Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare, similar agenda joined the Blk members, who approached critical topics in a forming the wider British Black Arts more playful, sometimes carnevalesque Movement: Lubaina Himid, Sonia manner, appealing more easily to the Boyce, Joy Gregory, Claudette Johnson taste of an increasingly international and (of Indian origin) Sutapa Biswas, and commercialised art scene. Chila Kumari Burman. Yet despite the same motivations, the women preferred different topics as they were not only fighting racism but also male dominance. While the men focused on historical Page 100 Hard Times 102 (2/2018) Ingrid von Rosenberg and current public events and symbols focused on women: work by 11 female (the flag, the cross, the slave ship, a artists was on display and thus came to lynching scene, cruise missiles etc.), the knowledge of a larger audience. In the women turned to the personal and 2011 Himid was invited to restage part of the private, especially the body and the the exhibition under the slightly changed domestic sphere, which was, however, title Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain perceived as a highly politicised space. in acknowledgement of the importance Characteristic examples were Sutapa the original show had for the gradual Biswas’s Housewife with Steak-Knives acceptance of black art as an essential (1985) and Sonia Boyce’s Missionary contribution to British art history. Position I and Missionary Position II (1985) (see von Rosenberg 2008). everal of the female artists, whose Swork was included in the pioneering ealising that public visibility was shows of the 80s, as well as some other Ran essential part of their political black women who started working in the struggle, many of the young artists 1980s like Joy Gregory, have developed engaged in curating. Eddie Chambers impressive careers as artists, curators, was particularly active among the men, archivists and academic teachers Lubaina Himid among the women. changing their techniques and topics, Always very interested in the work but never deviating from an underlying of other black artists, Himid had motivation: the critical view on British interviewed many of her colleagues for society and history from the “double her MA thesis “On Being a Young Black perspective” they were born to. As it is British Artist in Britain Today: A Political impossible to give a complete overview of Response to a Personal Experience” the success of black British women’s art (1984). Her first exhibitions in 1983 here, I will look at four exemplary careers were dedicated to women only: “Five and try to draw some general conclusions Black Women”, shown in the Africa concerning their public reception. Centre, and a few months later “Black Women Time Now” at the Battersea Lubaina Himid Arts Centre, displaying work of 15 et us begin with Himid. Born in women. Himid’s exhibition “The Thin Zanzibar in 1954 to an African Black Line” in 1985 was the first group L father and an English mother, she came exhibition of black artists hosted by a to London with her mother after her major British institution, the Institute of father’s death, four months old. Having Contemporary Arts (ICA)/London, and studied theatre design at Wimbledon – despite the gender-neutral title – also Art School but finding no entrance to Page 101 Hard Times 102 (2/2018) The Turner Prize 2017 - the theatre world after her BA, Himid Many critics have noticed the alluring first had to earn her living with waiting brightness of her saturated colour scale, and occasional teaching while studying seducing the viewer to swallow critical for her MA at the Royal College of messages along with aesthetic pleasure Art. Gradually she developed her own and fun, a combination reminiscent of artistic practice and committed herself the work of some male colleagues, e.g. to curating the work of fellow artists, Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Like finally running her own small Elbow them Himid has also relished the ironical Room Gallery from 1986 to 1988. Since re-working of icons of European art: Two 1990 she has been teaching at Lancaster Women referred to Portsmouth Dockyard Polytechnic, now University of Central (1877), a gallant painting by James Tissot Lancashire (UCLan), at the same time showing a Highlander flirting with two continuing to produce and exhibit her women in a boat. Another important own work as well as launching several specimen was included in the pre-Turner projects promoting black art, e.g. show of Himid’s work: A Fashionable Colour Code, an informative website Marriage (1987), an installation for an interested circle, and Making of 10 cut-out figures, is a modern Histories Visible, an ever growing version of Hogarth’s satirical print archive of images by and documentary Countess’s Morning Levée (1743-1745). material relating to black artists. ut-out figures from cardboard imid started with painting, and Cor wood have been a technique Hher Between the Two My Heart Is specially favoured by Himid from early Balanced of 1991, figuring two black on. She has traced it back to “a very women in a boat tearing to pieces the British tradition known as the dummy charts of colonialism, was early acquired board” (Himid 2018: 73), flat wooden by the Tate. Soon she also turned to figures, of waiters for example, she first installations using all kinds of material came across in Blenheim castle, but it was from paper, cardboard and wood to certainly also influenced by her training textiles and objects of everyday use, which as a theatre designer.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Gallery Guide Is Printed on Recycled Paper
    THE PLACE IS HERE 22 JUN – 10 SEP 2017 MAIN & FIRST FLOOR GALLERIES ADMISSION FREE EXHIBITION GUIDE THE PLACE IS HERE LIST OF WORKS 22 JUN – 10 SEP 2017 MAIN GALLERY The starting-point for The Place is Here is the 1980s: For many of the artists, montage allowed for identities, 1. Chila Kumari Burman blends word and image, Sari Red addresses the threat a pivotal decade for British culture and politics. Spanning histories and narratives to be dismantled and reconfigured From The Riot Series, 1982 of violence and abuse Asian women faced in 1980s Britain. painting, sculpture, photography, film and archives, according to new terms. This is visible across a range of Lithograph and photo etching on Somerset paper Sari Red refers to the blood spilt in this and other racist the exhibition brings together works by 25 artists and works, through what art historian Kobena Mercer has 78 × 190 × 3.5cm attacks as well as the red of the sari, a symbol of intimacy collectives across two venues: the South London Gallery described as ‘formal and aesthetic strategies of hybridity’. between Asian women. Militant Women, 1982 and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The questions The Place is Here is itself conceived of as a kind of montage: Lithograph and photo etching on Somerset paper it raises about identity, representation and the purpose of different voices and bodies are assembled to present a 78 × 190 × 3.5cm 4. Gavin Jantjes culture remain vital today. portrait of a period that is not tightly defined, finalised or A South African Colouring Book, 1974–75 pinned down.
    [Show full text]
  • Lubaina Himid OUR KISSES ARE PETALS
    Media Release: 5 April 2018 PRESS PREVIEW Thursday 10 May 2018 EXHIBITION 11 May – 30 September 2018 Lubaina Himid OUR KISSES ARE PETALS Lubaina Himid, Why are you Looking, 2018. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art will launch the first in a series of exhibitions for the UK’s largest public event of 2018, the Great Exhibition of the North (22 June – 9 September), with a solo show of new work by Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid. Our Kisses are Petals will run from 11 May – 30 September, and will feature a community-focussed outdoor commission beginning in June. Our Kisses are Petals originates from new paintings on cloth that employ the patterns, colours and symbolism of the Kanga, a vibrant cotton fabric traditionally worn by East African women as a shawl, head scarf, baby carrier, or wrapped around the waist. Typically, kangas consist of three parts: the pindo (border), the mji (central motif), and the jina (message or ‘name’), which often takes the form of a riddle or proverb. For Himid, these multicoloured fabrics are ‘speaking clothes’, which employ ‘the language of image, pattern and text through which one woman’s outfit talks to another’s’. Himid’s works engage in a dialogue with each other and with the viewer, both through their individual jina, borrowed from influential writers just as James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde, and through the invitation for visitors to rearrange the hanging works by a system of pulleys to form their own poetry. The suspended Kangas take on a flag-like quality, which, together with the colours and patterns of the fabrics, evoke regimental and ceremonial colonial flag-bearing.
    [Show full text]
  • Lubaina Himid Invisible Strategies Exhibition Notes
    2. Le Rodeur: The Lock, 2016 Revenge – A Masque in Five Tableaux 7. Fishing, 1987 9. Mr Salt’s Collection – The Ballad of 3. Le Rodeur: Exchange, 2016 4. Ankledeep, 1991 Fishing was originally part of a larger the Wing series, 1989 After completing this most recent 5. Five, 1991 installation: a cast of cutout painted This work was first shown as part characters roaming across gallery walls. of Himid’s solo exhibition The Ballad series, the artist realised that these 6. Carpet, 1992 interiors were the odd, empty rooms Collectively titled Restoring the Balance, of the Wing at Chisenhale Gallery, of her earlier Plan B paintings, now 8. Unwrapped but not Untied, 1991 these figures appeared within the London, in 1989. It displays the artist’s first retrospective exhibition influence on her practice of populated with a full cast of characters, Himid asserts: ‘After the mourning New Robes for MaShulan, a caricature, particularly eighteenth- and always with a glimpsed view of comes revenge.’ Revenge is at once collaboration with Maud Sulter held at century satirical cartoonists such the sea. They reflect Himid’s complex a monument to the victims of the Rochdale Art Gallery in 1987. In Sulter’s as James Gillray, George Cruikshank 1. Freedom and Change, 1984 personal relationship to water and the transatlantic slave trade, a critique of 10. Bone in the China: Success to the curatorial text, ‘Surveying the Scene’, and William Hogarth. The painting sea: ‘I have never been able to swim the patriarchy, and a space for dialogue. Africa Trade, c.1985 ‘Discourse is a primary tool against the she declared: ‘The show does not stand references the vast collection of properly and am very frightened of This series is a lamentation, an act of weapons used to marginalise and write in isolation.
    [Show full text]
  • Lubaina Himid
    Lubaina Himid Hollybush Gardens launches its new space with an exhibition by Lubaina Himid, a painter and installation artist who has dedicated much of her thirty-year long career to uncovering marginalised and silenced histories, figures and cultural moments. Born in Zanzibar, Lubaina Himid was then brought up in North London by her mother, a Royal College of Art educated textile designer whose keen interest in patterns inspired her to follow an artistic path. Himid first took a BA in Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art in the mid-1970s, choosing this discipline for the connections it bore with radical politics, and in particular Black politics. While studying Cultural History at the Royal College of Art six years later, and by then deeply engaged in a struggle against the absence of representation of Black and Asian women in the art world, Lubaina Himid became committed to showing the work of her contem- poraries Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Maud Sulter, alongside her own. She curated significant group exhibitions such as Five Black Women at the Africa Centre in 1983, Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre in 1983-84 and The Thin Black Line at the Institute for Contemporary Art in 1985, all of which were revisited in the temporary display Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain in 2011-12. In 1986, Himid exhibited her iconic installation A Fashionable Marriage at the Pentonville Gallery in London. Inspired by William Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode (1743), a series of six paintings satirising an arranged marriage gone wrong, Himid’s piece produced a biting critique of contemporary art and politics, and of their collusion.
    [Show full text]
  • Lubaina Himid Warp and Weft
    Lubaina Himid Firstsite Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1JH +44 (0) 1206 713 700 | www.firstsite.uk Warp and Weft Naming the Money, 2004, life-size painted cut-out plywood figures, audio. Loaned by the National Museums Liverpool, International Slavery Museum, and the artist. Photo: Spike Island Information Firstsite, Colchester, is delighted to present Warp and Weft, a survey of works by the 2017 Turner Prize nominee, Lubaina Himid. 1 July – 1 October 2017 A key figure in the Black Arts Movement, Himid first came to prominence in the 1980s when Opening event: Friday 30 June, 6 – 9pm she began organising exhibitions of work by her peers, who were underrepresented in the contemporary art scene. Her diverse approach disrupts preconceptions of the world by introducing historical and contemporary stories of racial bias and acts of violence inflicted upon oppressed communities. Himid is best known as a painter, and Warp and Weft is comprised of three bodies of work in which the artist adopts the mantel of the History painter to question its imperialist tradition. By reinserting black figures into this arena of power and prestige, Himid foregrounds the contribution of people of the African diaspora to Western culture and economy. The exhibition’s title, Warp and Weft, refers to the process by which threads are held in tension on a frame or loom to create cloth. Himid chose the title for its reference to Colchester’s important position in the wool trade between the 13th and 16th centuries, and its complex history of race and migration that is reflected in the productive tensions of Himid’s work.
    [Show full text]
  • Press Release
    Hollybush Gardens 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1r 5ey Tel: +44 (0)207 837 5991 www.hollybushgardens.co.uk lubaina himid Exhibition: 7 June - 15 August 2019 Preview: Thursday, 6 June 2019, 6:30 - 8:30 pm Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present a selection of drawings by Lubaina Himid that are being exhibited for the first time. This body of work was produced as part of the research process for what became Tailor, Striker, Singer, Dandy, a series of five painted portraits of black men that developed out of Himid’s encounter with the West African textiles held in the Manchester City Galleries’ extensive collection of historical fashion and clothing. Himid, whose mother was a textile designer, has been fascinated by patterns in garments since childhood. Patterns have populated her work from the 1980s to today, enlivening the visual surface and weaving together disparate threads—cultural, geographical, historical. Himid explains, ‘I love the language of pattern, its immense potential for movement, illusion, colour experiments and subliminal political messaging.' In developing the life-size portraits of Tailor, Striker, Singer, Dandy, Himid produced a body of drawings that interpret and re-contextualise the textiles she found in the collection. Colour, shape, and repetition are taken as devices embedded in clothing that are mobile and malleable, shifting in meaning across contexts. The drawings re-embed historical textile samples and clothing designs in the imagined male figures in anachronistic ways, animating the multi-directional and cross-historical flow of patterns in self-fashioning and identity. Lubaina Himid lives and works in Preston, UK and is a professor at the University of Central Lancashire.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae Chila Kumari Burman
    ! ! Curriculum Vitae Chila Kumari Burman Brought up in Liverpool and educated at the Slade School of Art in London, Chila Kumari Burman has worked experimentally across printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography and film since the mid-1980s. She draws on fine and pop art imagery in intricate multi- layered works which explore Asian femininity and her personal family history, and where Bollywood bling merges with childhood memories. The Bindi Girls are a series of female figures composed almost entirely of colourful and glittery bindis, gems and crystals. Meticulously handcrafted and embellished, they suggest a powerful yet playful femininity. From bindis and other fashion accessories to ice cream cones and ice lolly wrappers, Chila often uses everyday materials in her work, giving new meaning to items which others may see as worthless, cheap or kitsch. Ice Cream has a particular significance in her work and references her childhood in Liverpool where her father, who arrived as an immigrant from India in the 1950s, owned an ice cream van and was a popular figure as he drove around selling ice cream for over thirty years. As well as paying homage to her father, her Ice Cream works evoke the awakening of her own creative spirit when as a child she would help out in the ice cream van and became immersed in a world of colour, flavour and materials. Chila Kumari Burman’s work is held in a number of public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wellcome Trust in London, and the Devi Foundation in New Delhi.
    [Show full text]
  • Black Art, Black Power: Responses to Soul of a Nation
    Black Art, Black Power: Responses to Soul of a Nation Friday 13 October 2017 Starr Cinema, Tate Modern Programme 10.30 Welcome: Richard Martin (Tate) Californian Scenes 10.40 Kellie Jones (Columbia University), ‘South of Pico’ 11.00 Sampada Aranke (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), ‘Death’s Futurity’ 11.20 Discussion, chaired by Zoe Whitley (Tate) 11.50 Break; refreshments in Starr Foyer From Chicago and Washington to Lagos 12.20 Margo Natalie Crawford (University of Pennsylvania), ‘Black Public Interiority, Chicago-Style’ 12.40 Tuliza Fleming (National Museum of African American History and Culture), ‘Jeff Donaldson, FESTAC, and the Washington, D.C., Delegation’ 13.00 Discussion, chaired by Daniel Matlin (King’s College London) 13.30 Lunch New York Photography 14.30 Sherry Turner DeCarava (art historian) and Mark Godfrey (Tate) British Contexts: The Black Arts Movement and Beyond 15.10 Lubaina Himid (artist) and Marlene Smith (artist and curator), chaired by Melanie Keen (Iniva) 16.20 Break; refreshments in Starr Foyer Art in the Age of Black Lives Matter 16.50 Introduction: Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley 17.00 Barby Asante (artist), Kevin Beasley (artist) and Luke Willis Thompson (artist), chaired by Elvira Dyangani Ose (Creative Time and Goldsmiths, University of London) 18.00 Close; reception in Starr Foyer Biographies Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux , Artforum , Art Journal , Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies , and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine.
    [Show full text]
  • Researching Exhibitions of South Asian Women Artists in Britain in the 1980S
    Researching Exhibitions of South Asian Women Artists in Britain in the 1980s Alice Correia Abstract This paper narrates the author’s research methodologies and findings relating to her ongoing project, Articulating British Asian Art Histories. With a specific focus on four exhibitions of South Asian women artists uringd the 1980s and early 1990s, it provides an overview of her primary and secondary research, and presents archival material, which cumulatively gives a richer understanding of the aesthetic and political aims of exhibitors, and the contexts in which they were working. Exhibitions of exclusively women artists of South Asian heritage were rare during this period, but close visual analysis of individual exhibitions and artworks reveals an active engagement with the specificities of the female, British-Asian experience. This article is accompanied by two downloadable resources: a complete copy of the Numaish exhibition catalogue (Fig. 15) and a copy of the exhibition pamphlet for Jagrati (Fig. 22). Authors Research Fellow at the University of Salford Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sarah Victoria Turner and Hammad Nasar for inviting me to present my research at the conference, Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain 1900 to Now, and for their continued support whilst developing this article. My research has been richly enhanced by conversations with numerous artists, especially Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Nina Edge, Bhajan Hunjan, and Symrath Patti, who also provided materials from their personal archives for reproduction here. Research for this paper was undertaken during a Mid-Career Fellowship funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and I am grateful to all at the Centre for their intellectual and practical support.
    [Show full text]
  • Impact Case Study
    Impact case study (REF3b) Institution: University of Central Lancashire Unit of Assessment: UOA 34 Art & Design: History, Practice and Theory Title of case study: Making Histories Visible 1. Summary of the impact (indicative maximum 100 words) Making Histories Visible produces visual art projects with internationally recognised museums and galleries, in which new artworks and installations activate institutional and curatorial policies to re- examine collections and collecting. By investigating the historic through the contemporary, using the mechanisms of display and interventions, youth centred workshops, symposia, web-sites and publications; we help museums find new relevance within contemporary society. Thin Black Line(s) Tate Britain (2011/12), Cotton Global Threads Whitworth and Manchester Galleries (2011/2012), Jelly Mould Pavilions NML (2010), reflect collaborations and sustainable relationships with a wide, influential range of museum curators, directors and community leaders. 2. Underpinning research (indicative maximum 500 words) Professor Lubaina Himid and Ms Susan Walsh joined UCLan in 1990 and 1998 respectively. The researchers asked questions through visual art practice about how to show that the cultural contribution and participation of ethnically diverse communities, at every level, can develop and enrich the museum experience for a broad range of audiences, while encouraging a sense of belonging and a desire for engagement. Impact on Institutional Policy Himid‟s strategy of interweaving new artworks into the display of historical collections, and co- curating and recontextualising collections in new ways, allows previously invisible issues to surface. In 2004, Himid made Naming the Money having investigated work in the collection held at the Hatton gallery (Newcastle). It allowed discussion around forcible migration, whilst also initiating a dialogue between the museum and the local communities using neglected fabric samples from the collection.
    [Show full text]
  • Friendship and Strength
    Still Lively 20 Today’s challenge from Sam Hale Friendship and Strength During the pandemic we have all found ways to sustain ourselves through very demanding times. Our collective creative endeavour and the friendships forged through Still Lively have sustained and inspired me. I would like us to explore the idea of strength and friendship this week. As a starting point you might like to look at the work of Lubaina Himid, one of the artists featured in Stellar: Stars of our Contemporary Collection, on show at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 17th January 2021. The exhibition presents an overview of recent, current and ongoing developments in British Art, through the lens of Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s collection. The Tate website says that Himid “wants to tell us beautiful stories about friendship and strength.” Lubaina Himid CBE (b. 1954) is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities. Himid was one of the first artists involved in the UK's Black Art movement in the 1980s and continues to create activist art which is shown in galleries in Britain, as well as worldwide. Himid was appointed MBE in June 2010 for "services to Black Women's Art". She won the Turner Prize in 2017 and was made a CBE in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours, "for services to art." Born in Zanzibar, Himid moved to the UK with her mother when she was only four months old. Her Mother was a textile designer.
    [Show full text]
  • Lubaina Himid
    Lubaina Himid Preview: Thursday 10 October 6 – 8 pm Exhibition: 11 October - 9 November 2013 We are pleased to announce our inaugural exhibition at Warner Yard by Lubaina Himid. Coming to prominence in the 1980s as a protagonist within the Black British Art Movement, Lubaina Himid has curated and taken part in pivotal exhibitions, research and writing. Since then, museum collections have held particular interest for Himid, as a space to address, reflect and challenge these containers of history, memory and hidden experiences. Initially studying to become a theatre designer, the language of scenography is evident across Himid’s work - from the seminal pieces such as A Fashionable Marriage, 1987 through to large scale installations Naming the Money (2004), a work comprising 100 cut out figures. Criss crossing a multitude of references, painting and installation have become Himid’s preferred mediums to express questions around art, authorship, illusion and politics - often exploring issues surrounding Black identity. Conscious of the fact that painting has a history as adornment of architecture, homes, bodies and fabrics, often involving cultures and artists that are marginalised, Himid has situated her practice at the intersection between design and art and between Western and African artistic traditions. In her work she proposes historical narratives often excluded from mainstream accounts, giving names and voices to the unheard. This exhibition will include Carrot Piece, 1985, a work initially exhibited in the 1980s at the ICA, London. The work, one of Himid’s signature cutouts, depicts a scene of two figures that plays out cultural and racial hierarchies of the past and today.
    [Show full text]