Sonia Boyce

Sonia Dawn Boyce, MBE RA (born 1962), is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is Professor at Middlesex University^[1] and Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London.^[2] Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. With an emphasis on collaborative work, Boyce has been working closely with other artists since 1990, often involving improvisation and spontaneous performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video and sound, and her art explores the interstices between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator. To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for over thirty years in several art colleges across the UK.^[3]

Background

Born in London, Sonia Boyce studied at Stourbridge College in the West Midlands. She works across a range of media including photography, installation and text.^[4] She came to prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s.^[5] Her work also references feminism.^[6] Ron Exley (2001) has written: "The effect of her work has been to re-orientate and re-negotiate the position of Black or Afro-Caribbean art within the cultural mainstream."^[7]

An early exhibition was in 1983 at the Africa Centre, London, entitled Five Black Women. Boyce's early works were large chalk-and-pastel drawings depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. In them she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean and experienced through her own particular background. It has been suggested that through this work the artist examined her position as a black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience was rooted.^[8]

In her later works Boyce used diverse media including digital photography to produce composite images depicting contemporary black life. Although her focus is seen to have shifted away from specific ethnic experiences, her themes continue to be the experiences of a black woman living in a white society, and how religion, politics and sexual politics made up that experience.^[8]

She has taught widely and uses workshops as part of her creative process, and her works can be seen in many national collections.^[9] Boyce's works are held in the collection of Tate Modern,^[10] Government Art Collection^[11] and The British Council.

Sonia Boyce was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2007, for services to art.^[12] In 2016, Sonia Boyce was elected as a member of the Royal Academy.^[13]

Medium

In her early artistic years Boyce used chalk and pastel to make drawings of her friends, family and herself. She graduated later to incorporate photography, graphic design, film and caricature to convey very political messages within her work. The incorporation of collage in her work allowed her to create complicated and interesting pieces. It is important to note Boyce's utilization of caricature within her work. The caricature is historically meant to showcase exaggerated features of individuals. By using caricatures, which are often grotesque and incite negative perceptions of their subjects, she allows herself to reclaim them in her own image.^[14]

Message

Boyce's work is vastly politically affiliated. She utilizes a variety of mediums within the same work to convey messages revolving around black representation, perceptions of the black body and pervasive notions that arose from colonial pseudoscience. Within her bodies of work Boyce wishes to convey the personal isolation that results from being black in a white supremacist society. In her work she explores notions of the Black Body as the "other". Commonly, she uses collage to convey a body of art that incites a complicated history, one that is untold and important. Boyce rose as a prominent artist in the 1980s when the Black Cultural Renaissance took place in the United Kingdom. The movement arose out of Margaret Thatcher's conservatism and also Enoch Powell's racism. Using this societal backdrop, Boyce takes conventional English narrative surrounding the black body and turns it upside down. Through her art she conveys a hope to overturn ethnographic notions of race that pervaded throughout slavery and after the slaves had been emancipated.^[14]

Exhibitions

• Century City: art and culture in the modern metropolis, Tate Modern, London (2001)
• Recent Sonia Boyce: la, la, la, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2001)
• Sharjah International Bienal 7, Sharjah (2005)
• Devotional, National Portrait Gallery, London (2007)
• For you, only you (ed. Paul Bonaventura, Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University, and tour, 2007/2008)^[15]
• Crop Over, Harewood House, Leeds, and Barbados Museum & Historical Society (2007/2008)
• Like Love – Part One, Spike Island, Bristol, and tour (2009–2010);^[16] "Part 2 and Part 3" (2009–2010)
• Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty, Thessaloniki Biennal 2, Greece (2009)
• Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool and tour (2010)
• Black Sound White Cube, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin (2011)
• 8+8 Contemporary International Video Art, 53 Museum, Quangzhou (2011)
• "The Impossible Community", Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011)
• Migrations: Journeys into British Art, Tate Britain (2012)
• There is no archive in which nothing gets lost, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2012)
• Keywords, Rivington Place, London (2013)
• No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (2015–16)^[17]
• All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice (2015)
• Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre (Dada Nice), Villa Arson, Nice (2016)

Publications

• Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues (Gilane Tawadros, Kala Press, 1997)
• Annotations 2/Sonia Boyce: Performance (ed. Mark Crinson, Iniva – the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998)
• In 2007, Boyce, David A. Bailey and Ian Baucom jointly received the History of British Art Book Prize (USA) for the edited volume Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva and AAVAA.
• ‘Sonia Boyce and Crop Over’ (Allison Thompson, Small Axe, Volume 13, Number 2, 2009)^[18]
• Like Love, Spike Island, Bristol and tour (ed. Axel Lapp, Green Box Press, Berlin, 2010)^[19][20]

Research positions

• 1996–2002, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of East London
• Director of AAVAA (the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive), managing a Research Centre on the work of contemporary artists of African and Asian descent working in the UK.
• 2004–2005 NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Artist Fellow, researching the social dynamics of collaboration in art.
• 2008–2011 AHRC Research Fellowship on the ephemeral nature of collaborative practice in art at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, with a concluding project The Future is Social.^[21][22]
• 2015-2018, as Principal Investigator for the Black Artists and Modernism (BAM),^[23] a three-year research program that investigates the artworks of Black-British artists and the works' relationship to modernism.^[24]

Further reading

• Sonia Boyce (exhibition catalogue, intro P. Ntuli; London, Air Gallery, 1987) [texts by Boyce]
• The Impossible Self (exhibition catalogue by B. Ferguson, S. Nairne, S. Boyce and others, Winnipeg, A.G., 1988)
• M. Corris: "Sonia Boyce at Vanessa Devereux Gallery", Artforum, xxx (1992), p. 124
• G. Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues (London, 1997)
• Recent Sonia Boyce: La, La, La (exhibition catalogue by S. Fillin-Yeh and M. Verhagen; Portland, OR, Reed Coll, Cooley A.G.; 2001)
• David A. Bailey, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Ugwu (eds), MIRAGE: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, ICA, 1995.^[25]
• M. Crinson (ed.): Sonia Boyce: Performance, Institute of International Visual Arts in collaboration with Cornerhouse (London, 1998)^[9]

References

External links

• John Elmes, "Interview with Sonia Boyce", Times Higher Education, 17 December 2015.
• InIVA on Sonia Boyce
• National Portrait Gallery
• "Sonia Boyce" by Roy Ixley (artist's stories)
• Sue Hubbard, "Sonia Boyce at The Agency" (review), The Independent, 6 December 2004.
• Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues. Kala Press, 1997.
• Sonia Boyce "Artist biography", Tate online.