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Richard Hylton on 'Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic'
29 April 2025, 5:00 pm–7:00 pm
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
-
Rooms 101-10220 Gordon SquareLondonWC1H 0AWUnited Kingdom
Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was one of the most gifted, perceptive, and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic is the first book-length study of a protean practice which spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, and new technologies. In this talk, Richard Hylton explores aspects of Rodney’s career and considers some of the challenges in writing a book of historical recovery.
About the Speaker
Richard Hylton
Lecturer in Contemporary Art at SOAS
Richard Hylton is a curator, writer, artist, and currently Lecturer in Contemporary Art at SOAS. Since the early 1990s, he has organized a significant number of exhibitions involving a wide variety of artists, including Barbara Walker, Magdalene Odundo, Matthew Houlding, Alicia Paz and Eugene Palmer. His edited monographs include The Best of Janette Parris (2002) and Doublethink: Donald Rodney (2003). His first single-authored book The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of policies, initiatives and attitudes 1976-2006 was published in 2007. His recent writing has appeared in journals and publications such as The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and Art Monthly.
More about Richard Hylton