01/08/2021

Celebrating Black Women Artists

 

My two latest pieces for the lovely and instructive website I AM HISTORY 


‘Mother Of Mankind’ Exhibition Celebrating Black Women Artists



2021 is a great year of reckoning for many Black women artists in the UK, from the great winner of the 2017 Turner Prize Lubaina Himid to critically acclaimed Sonia Boyce, but also for young and upcoming artists. And an amazing set of exhibitions allows us to enjoy their powerful work this summer and autumn.

It starts with the exceptional Mother of Mankind exhibition on view at the House Of Fine Arts Mayfair space in London, which is free and open until 31 August. The Ghanaian gallerist Adora Mba especially curated it to feature 16 global Black women artists, with each of them portraying a unique sense of what Black female consciousness can be. Mother of Mankind is a reference to the African continent as the origin of humanity, the exhibition creates cross-continental dialogues around the subject of Black femininity.   

Adora Mba


Adora Mba is the founder and director of ADA \ contemporary art gallery, established in Accra, Ghana, in 2020. She felt privileged to “showcase the works of these remarkably talented artists in one of the cities I call home”, she said. The artists presented in this show are in the early days of their artistic careers, yet they are “already making waves and drawing attention amidst an industry, which tends to be more supportive of their male counterparts,” Adora added.  



Joined together in a virtual discussion, the artists’ works compose a reflection of different parts of the African continent and its diaspora, from Nigeria to South Africa, the UK, the USA, and Canada. Featured works by award-winning artists, such as Emma Prempeh (British artist based in London), Jamilla Okubo (an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intricacies of belonging to an American, Kenyan, and Trinidadian identity) and Adebunmi Gbadebo (born and based in New Jersey).

I visited the gallery on the 23rd of July and could immediately feel that the curator definitely united powerful pieces. This exhibition is the result of years of work with young women artists, from a curator with a deep interest in promoting Black painters.


With ‘Spectators’, Cece Phillips reverses the gaze, showing African women in a gallery looking at a painting depicting naked white people. Jamilla Okubo’s ‘I do not come to you as a reality. I come to you as The Myth’ shines with a bright red background, sunbeams and a golden bird overlooking its characters.

And Emma Prempeh’s portraits of missed relatives, including the artist’s grandmother, covered in gold, represent the feeling of separation haunting every transatlantic family. Curators from the arts organisation V.O Curations said of Prempeh’s paintings that her main subject, “family and generational continuity”, explores and questions relational ties in a search for spirituality enabling her to analyse existential questions about memory, ancestral ties, and human fear of death.


The shows display of work by a young generation of artists includes Ekene Emeka-Maduka (b. 1996 in Nigeria, working in Winnipeg, Canada), Cece Philips (self-taught visual artist based in London), Chinaza Agbor (from Texas, USA), Ayobola Kekere-Ekun and Marcellina Akpojotor (both from Nigeria), Brixton-based British-Nigerian artist Sola Olulode, Ohio-based Alexandria Couch, Muofhe Manavhela (multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Johannesburg), Cinthia Sifa Mulanga (b. in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997), Mookho Ntho (from Lesotho), Bria Fernandes (USA), Sophia Oshodin (self-taught figurative storytelling painter based in London), Damilola Onosowbo Marcus (from Lagos), Nigerian British artist Tobi Alexandra Falade and Dimakatso Mathopa (b. in 1995 in Mpumalanga, South Africa).

Some of these artists will also be part of the 1-54 London African Art Fair in London in October 2021.



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Lubaina Himid And Sonia Boyce, Pioneers Of Black British Art



The pioneering Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce paved the way for Black women artists in Britain. Both have incredible work on display this year that you absolutely must see. 

Sonia Boyce

Sonia Boyce’s exhibition In The Castle Of My Skin (11 June 2021 – 12 September 2021) is currently on show at MIMA – the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Next year she will also be the first Black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Boyce works with a variety of media – drawing, print, photography, video and audio. Born in 1962 in Islington, London, in a British Afro-Caribbean family, she was always drawing as a child, and at 17 decided to study art, joining a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology in 1979, before starting a BA in Fine Art at the prestigious Stourbridge College in the West Midlands. Soon, Sonia took part in the wider Black British cultural “renaissance”, a movement that arose out of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism, with the likes of Eddie Chambers and Horace Ové.


In 1982, she attended the first national conference of Black artists and met Lubaina Himid, then a leading figure promoting the work of Black women artists. In 1985, Himid selected some of Boyce’s works for the exhibition The Thin Black Line, at the ICA. In 1987, at only 25, Boyce had her first drawing bought by Tate Modern, Missionary Position II, becoming the first British Black female artist to enter the collection. Since the 1990s, her work has been largely exhibited in the UK and abroad. 

Lubaina Himid’s next exhibition will land at the Tate Modern in London on 25 November 2021. Born in Zanzibar in 1954, she moved to Britain as a child with her parents in the 1960s and grew up in London. She studied theatre design, before entering the Royal Art College. From then, she never stopped supporting other Black artists’ debuts, including Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, Claudette Johnson, Veronica Ryan and Ingrid Pollard.



These past five years, she received superb praises for her wonderful exhibitions Navigating Charts, Naming The Money and Invisible Strategies. The pieces addressed the trauma and memory of slavery, touring the UK for year. “I was, very early on, a political teenager,” Lubaina Himid told me a few years ago. “In the 80s, the political situation was extreme in the UK for minorities. Working with Black artists was luckily never a lonely path: We did some early collaborative exhibitions with the Black Art Group, the Black Art Gallery in London, Nottingham, and Bristol. It was the opposite of lonesome. But it was a battle.” 

 This is still true today. But these pioneers are now seconded by a new generation, as vivid and creative. 

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Summary of exhibition details below:



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