Yes, But Why? Tate curator Laura Castagnini on the work of Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania in 1954 and moved with her mother to London when she was just four months old. She studied Theater Design at Wimbledon College of the Arts in the mid-1970s, followed by an MA in Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, where she graduated with a thesis on Young Black Artists in Britain Today.

She went onto play a vital and vocal role in the British Black Arts Movement of the1980s. As part of a network of female artists of color – alongside Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Maud Sulter and others – she exhibited in, and curated, some of the most important exhibitions of that decade.  

In 1991, Himid moved to Preston, a town in the north-west of England, about an hour north of Manchester. Drawn perhaps by her mother’s Lancastrian heritage, the complex social and industrial history of this region has played an important role in her practice.

One of Himid’s key themes is the way that people of color have been represented, misrepresented and silenced throughout history. She is especially interested in tokenism in the art world and how women of color have been treated by galleries and museums.

Take The Carrot Piece, a piece which features two large painted cut-outs. A white man wearing brightly-colored clothes rides a unicycle, dangling a carrot in front of a Black woman, who looks back at him warily.

This work, Himid explains, is about how cultural institutions want to be seen to integrate people of color into their programmes, without seriously engaging with their work or the issues it raises. But the female figure in this work resists his demand for attention.

“We as Black women understood how we were being patronized,” Himid said, “to be cajoled and distracted by silly games and pointless offers. We understood, but we knew what sustained us… and what we really needed to make a positive cultural contribution: self-belief, inherited wisdom, education and love.”

As a trained stage designer, it’s no surprise that Himid’s work feels theatrical. In her paintings she likes to use bold, rich acrylic colors for her characters, who often wear intricately textured or patterned clothes.

This influence is even more evident in her cut-outs – large, two-dimensional figures made to stand upright, and carefully positioned in a space so that they surround the viewer.

These figures are full of personality. Take her 2004 installation Naming the Money, which tells the untold stories of enslaved  and servants. It features 100 cut-outs of people, each with their original African names and jobs, as well as their new names and jobs after they were sold into slavery.

Himid noticed that in 17th and 18th Century European paintings, slaves were often included to show off how rich the subjects were. They were belongings to boast about; we rarely hear their stories. So by imagining these figures’ narratives, Himid takes on the racism that has skewed our visual culture for centuries.

As a child, Himid frequently visited art galleries and museums and her work has been in conversation with art history throughout her career. Freedom and Change (1984) is painted on a large pink bedsheet, with the two white figures from Picasso’s 1922 painting Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race) re-imagined as two Black women leading a pack of snarling dogs away from the buried heads of two white men.

She’s also referenced the work of William Hogarth, whose engravings satirised the worst excesses of 18th Century society.

“London in the 1980s in the midst of the hedonistic, greedy, self-serving, go-getting opportunistic mayhem was a fabulous location for me as a satirist and wit,” Himid writes.