Modern Art Oxford presents the first major survey exhibition by British artist Lubaina Himid. One of the pioneers of the British Black Arts Movement, Himid first came to prominence in the 1980s when she began organising exhibitions of work by her peers, whom she felt were under-represented in the contemporary art scene. Himid’s work challenges the stereotypical depictions of black figures in art history, foregrounding the contribution of the African diaspora to Western culture.
Invisible Strategies brings together a wide range of Himid’s paintings from the 1980s to the present day, as well as sculptures, ceramics and works on paper. The exhibition opens with Himid’s monumental Freedom and Change, 1984, which appropriates and transforms the female figures from Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race), 1922, into black women, powerfully and humorously subverting one of the most canonical paintings in Western art history. Containing many works shown for the first time in decades alongside pieces never-before seen in a public gallery, this exhibition highlights Himid’s consistently thought-provoking and distinctive visual style.
Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid’s career as an artist, curator and scholar has been central to rethinking the Western canon of art history and museological practices over the past 30 years. Born in Zanzibar in 1954, and moving to England shortly afterwards, her education includes a Masters in Cultural History at the Royal College of Art in London with a graduating thesis titled Young Black Artists in Britain Today, anticipating her involvement in the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and 90s.
Himid went on to organise a number of group exhibitions throughout the 1980s, including Five Black Women at the Africa Centre, London (1983), The Thin Black Line at ICA, London (1985), and Unrecorded Truths at the Elbow Room (1986), which brought to public attention her own generation of black female artists, questioning the limits of their creative visibility in the process. Her own work challenges these boundaries, as seen in her solo show Revenge, featuring consecutive paintings of black women protagonists and memorials to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, at Rochdale Art Gallery and the South Bank Centre, London, in 1992, which contested the pictorial narratives so frequently repeated in art history.
She completed a residency at Tate St Ives between 1998 and 2000, and has participated in a number of group exhibitions including Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art at the V&A, London, in 2007, and more recently, Migrations at Tate Britain, Keywords at the International Institute of Visual Arts and Tate Liverpool (2013/14) and Burning Down the House at the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2014).
In addition to her prolific artistic practice, she holds the position of Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, where she leads the interdisciplinary visual art research project Making Histories Visible, reflecting critically on the success and failures of the Black Arts Movement and participating in numerous conferences on art of the diasporas. Revisiting her earlier work, she staged Thin Black Lines in 2011 at Tate Britain with curator Paul Goodwin, and has produced a series of research documentaries including Open Sesame (2005) and The Point of Collection (2007), in collaboration with Tate Liverpool.
Theme
The exhibition features numerous paintings that explore Himid’s expansive and vibrant palette, including Metal/Paper, Beach House (1995), where the fiery hues and foreboding views of water speak to a sense of danger on the horizon; Zanzibar – Sea: Wave Goodbye Say Hello (1999), where the experience of the artist’s homecoming is rhythmically abstracted; and Plan B (1999), which imagines peculiar interior spaces of refuge and escape, poised halfway between safety and peril.
These evocative sites are revisited in a new painting series, Le Rodeur (2016), named after a nineteenthcentury slave ship. Mysterious rooms are populated with theatrically staged figures in dramatic, ambiguous settings that invoke Himid’s recurring iconography of vessels, classical architecture, blocks of abstract pattern and choppy waters. The sea and poetic abstractions of it are woven throughout Himid’s work over the last two decades. It is a near constant presence, often observed from a watchful distance, its dangers respected and feared. These series of paintings are also connected by acts of journey making: a biographical echo of the artist’s own formative journey, aged four months, from her birthplace in Zanzibar to her mother’s home in England. Lubaina Himid’s work is also presented at Spike Island, Bristol, and Nottingham Contemporary.
Painting is seen in the intense dialogue taking place in the 1920s Five. For Himid,
These characters take and seductive attraction that colour provokes. is located in the power of colour: the emotions, sense of identity, This recovery of painting for women, artists and non-artists alike, On the outside and inside of our homes on our bodies on fabric.’ is ours, we have always used pigment and colour on surfaces. women not enter the arena wielding this weapon. […] Paint enter the arena of illusion and prophecy.
Why then should dialogues about art, they are the tool with which the artist can As Himid explained in 1991: ‘Paintings are at the centre of the selecting history’, as the art historian Griselda Pollock defines it. symbolic and aesthetic support of a too selective and always use painting as a weapon against Western ‘canon’ formation – ‘the alternative forms of representation, and new readings of history, to modernism. Her reclamation of grand, painterly traditions proposes history painting and the white male territory of twentieth-century power and prestige, Himid tackles the cultural imperialism of By reinserting forgotten black figures into this arena of colonial new conversations. violence but by continuing to survive and by making possible action in response to their experiences of oppression, not through
At the heart of this exhibition are works from Himid’s sequence their contemporary counterparts. contributions, skills and stories of black historical figures and galleries in the United Kingdom, while retrieving the hidden to engage with the often-overlooked histories of museums and thirty years, her artistic and exhibition-making practice has sought Himid argues, are made invisible. Over the course of more than are not talked about, who are not shown in galleries and museums, and as subjects) from public exhibitions and collections. Artists that work speaks out against the erasure of black women (as artists Asserting political action through the medium of paint, Himid’s argument, change – Lubaina Himid visual language to encourage conversation, …
I am a political strategist who uses a I am not a painter in the strictest sense Revenge – A Masque in Five Tableaux (1991–92). and patterns. by depicting monuments, vessels and fabrics in vivid colours historical narratives of the trauma and survival of African peoples Originally exhibited as a 12-part installation, this series addresses Revenge retells the history of European painting, always talking, always strategising. This new form of history women, who time travel across different historical periods – sculpture and architecture from the perspective of two black
Interactive
Visit the Project Space, next to the Modern Art Oxford Shop, which has been transformed into a Resources & Ideas room. Leave us your comments, read a book on Lubaina Himid’s work, or create a drawing to take away.
To significantly raise the profile of this important artist, Modern Art Oxford, Spike Island and Nottingham Contemporary are running concurrent presentations of Himid’s work from January 2017.
Invisible Strategies is supported by the Arts Council England Strategic Touring Fund.
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