Selected Exhibitions

Phaophanit & Piper (1995)

For the peoples who occupy the western and northern corners of what Robert Farris Thompson describes as 'the black Atlantic', the realities of nomadism, of dispersal, of displacement and migration are keenly felt. The metaphor of the journey, the passage of time, being measured by the physical passage through geographical space is therefore a recurrent theme in many of the cultural expressions generated from this segment of the African Diaspora. 'Long Journey/New Frontiers' is an attempt to reference what Amiri Baraka has dubbed the 'Motion of History' as it has impacted upon peoples of African descent through use of the metaphor of physical terrain.

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Frank Bowling (1996)

Frank Bowling is an artist who has been painting for the best part of four decades. He was born in Guyana, a country near the top of South America, nestled between Venezuela, Brazil and Surinam. He first came to London at the age of fourteen, to complete his schooling. He was first a poet, eventually turning to painting in his late teens. After periods of study at art colleges in London, his career as a painter began in earnest with solo exhibitions in London in the early 60s.

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Tam Joseph - This is History (1998)

Tam Joseph is a uniquely talented, multidimensional artist. There are primarily two reasons why, within the context of Black artists in Britain, Joseph is such a fascinating individual. The first is his age. He was born in Dominica, in the Caribbean, in 1947. He came to London at the age of eight, eventually going on to fractious, unsatisfactory periods of study at London art colleges in the late 1960s. He has, since the end of that decade, maintained and developed his practice as a visual artist and sometime sculptor.

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Mildred Howard (1999)

This exhibition represents a valuable opportunity for gallery-going audiences within England. Primarily, it gives such audiences a chance to view the work of one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most accomplished and widely recognised artists.

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Some Kind of Black (2000)

'Some Kind of Black' broadly represent the strands of my curatorial practice over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s. There is an approximate chronology to the works chosen, insofar as one of the earliest pieces dates from 'D-Max', a photographic exhibition that I co-ordinated in 1987. Another piece of work comes from an early series 'Fragments' by Vong Phaophanit, which I exhibited in 1988. Each piece of work is accompanied by a caption detailing my relationship to the piece - sometimes these references are curatorial, other times, the references are critical Other pieces, such as those by Alan Zion and Woody Joseph, represent research interests I have developed in Jamaica. Work by Mildred Howard and Michael Platt represents artists from the United States with whom I have also worked.

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Eugene Palmer - Recent Paintings (2000)

As a dedicated and committed painter, Eugene Palmer's practice has continually changed and developed over much of the past two decades. Starting with his fresh, colourful and bright abstract paintings of the early to mid 1980s, Eugene has committed and applied himself to mastering and utilising the principles of painting and drawing. This has directly led to a profound creative restlessness that has seen him attempting to explore ever more focussed areas of painting. As a curator, I have worked with Eugene on a number of occasions over the past twelve years or so and have taken much pleasure in observing this creative restlessness and this striving for ever greater levels of artistic maturity.

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Anthony Key - Walcot Chapel (2002)

British-Chinese artist Anthony Key has constructed a giant brick Buddha in a deconsecrated Bath chapel, using plaster casts of Chinese take-away tin food containers as his building blocks. By creating this giant Buddha in what was once a Christian place of worship, Key has created a startling metaphor for the Chinese 'immigrant' seemingly at odds with the dominant cultural sensibilities and assumptions of the environment in which he finds himself. For many Chinese immigrants the Chinese takeaway industry has been both an introduction to British life and a way of escaping drudgery. It has offered families the chance to make a living in a foreign country without being able to speak much English. It has also been the method by which their British-born children become educated and move into higher paid jobs. But the takeaway brick represents more than simply the building block by which Chinese immigrants have earned a living and educated their children. The Buddha has been constructed in Walcot Chapel, in the centre of historic Bath. Several thousand bricks have been cast and coloured to resemble Bath stone. The work attempts to provoke debate about a range of issues, including the political and cultural ideas that underpin the architectural grandeur and pretensions of the Georgian City itself.

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Medina Hammad - New and Recent Work (2002)

Medina Hammad is a painter and within her work, she consistently concerns herself with issues centred on the particular complexities of her identity. Her paintings contain much in the way of implicit and explicit references to her life as a British woman, living in the 21st century, born of a Sudanese Arab father and an English mother. Medina's work explores, in fascinating and visually engaging ways, the dual heritage of her parentage and the multiple senses of cultural identification and detachment that this identity has brought with it. Medina, through her work, has been able to establish a respectful yet probing and interrogating proximity between herself and her 'Sudanese' heritage. Within this work, Medina visually expresses 'a desire to observe and understand' her Sudanese/English background.

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Pat Ward Williams (2005)

Pat Ward Williams is one of the most perceptive and challenging image-makers working in the United States . Though she is not in a conventional sense at least a photographer, her stock in trade is the photographic image. She uses photographs as a means of animating and graphically illustrating potent debates and her own unique perceptions about culture, about history and identity, and how such concerns are irreversibly intertwined with the photographic medium. One of the reasons her work is so compelling is she consistently takes as a starting point for her practice the belief that the photograph can never simply be a dispassionate or unbiased visual representation. Instead, photography is perhaps the most loaded of mediums, frequently used against particular groups of people.

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Curator's Eye II (2006)

When it comes to art in Jamaica, everything is history and everything is identity. Or at least, art in Jamaica can be read through the prism of these complimentary notions. Art in Jamaica is rich with complex narratives reflective of the country's incredible history. From its earliest beginnings through to more recent and current practice, art in Jamaica can, without difficulty, be scrutinised for its often multilayered commentary on the lives and the struggles of the people of the country. We can, in the first instance, look at the tradition and the history of narrative painting by the island's figurative artists as being both a reflection of and an acknowledgement of, the struggles of ordinary people for day to day survival in what is, in no uncertain terms, an economically challenging environment for the country's poor. But we can also read Jamaica's tradition and history of narrative painting for its references to other types of struggle: the struggle for nationhood, the struggle for self-determination, and the struggle to fulfil one's potential as a human being.

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Being Lady Lucy (2007)

This exhibition brings together several bodies of work by the enigmatic Bristol-based artist, Lady Lucy, produced over the past couple of years. The exhibition also features a selection of the fascinating source material from which the artist draws inspiration for her candid and fascinating studies of human existence, be that existence real, imagined, remembered, or meticulously constructed.

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Art History (2014)

Art History represents a unique and fascinating opportunity for gallery audiences in Austin to access a selection of work drawn from the art collection of Rudolph Green and Joyce Christian. It stands as a collection of local, regional, national, and international significance. The Green Christian Collection contains work by leading figures of 20th century African-American art history. Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Norman Lewis, Robert Colescott, and Boscoe Holder - such are the important practitioners represented in the collection, which not only comprises works of great mid-20th-century painters, but also includes some of the singular work being produced by contemporary African-American and African Diaspora artists. Present-day practitioners such as Radcliffe Bailey and the [University of Texas at Austin's] Department of Art and Art History's own Micheal Ray Charles and John Yancey have an important and conspicuous presence within the exhibition. The exhibition's title, Art History, makes a deliberate pitch to present these artists as being a central, rather than a peripheral, presence within the discipline of art history.

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