Sonia Dawn Boyce (born 1962) is a British AfroCaribbean artist, living and working in London. She is Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts, London. 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. Her art explores `the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator’. To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than thirty years in several art colleges across the UK.
In February 2020 Boyce was selected by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2022. She is the first Black woman to be selected.
1962
British Afro Caribbean
Born in Islington, London in 1962, Boyce attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town, East London, from 1973 to 1979.[5] From 1979 to 1980 she completed a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology and she completed a BA in Fine Art at Stourbridge College from 1980 to 1983 in the West Midlands.
Boyce works with a range of media including photography, installation and text. She gained prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s. Her work also references feminism. Roy Exley (2001) has written that “The effect of her work has been to reorientate and renegotiate the position of Black or Afro Caribbean art within the cultural mainstream.”
An early exhibition in which she participated was Five Black Women in 1983 at the Africa Centre, London. Boyce’s early works were large chalk and pastel drawings depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. Drawing from her background, she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean. Through this work the artist examined her position as a Black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience was rooted.[11] She also took part in the 1983 exhibition Black Women Time Now.
In 1989 she was a part of a group of four female artists who created an exhibition called The Other Story, which was the first display of British African, Caribbean, and Asian Modernism.
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 make up that experience.
Boyce was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2007, for services to art. On 9 March 2016 Boyce was elected as a member of the Royal Academy.
In 2018, as part of a retrospective exhibition by Boyce at Manchester Art Gallery, she was invited by the curators of the gallery to make new work in dialogue with the collection’s 18th and 19thcentury galleries. Boyce invited performance artists to engage with these works in these galleries in, as the artists said, ‘a non-binary way’. As part of one of these events the artists decided to temporarily remove J. W. Waterhouse’s painting Hylas and the Nymphs from the gallery wall. This prompted a wide ranging discussion of issues of censorship and curatorial decision making, interpretation and judgement, which was contributed to by gallery audiences and the media.
Boyce has taught widely and uses workshops as part of her creative process, and her works can be seen in many national collections. Her works are held in the collections of Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, British Council and the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre.
In 2018 she was the subject of the BBC Four documentary film Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History, in which Brenda Emmanus followed Boyce as she travelled the UK following the history of Black artists and modernism. Boyce led a team in preparing an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery that focused on artists of African and Asian descent who have played a part in shaping the history of British art.
She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to art.
It was announced in February 2020 that Boyce had been selected as the first Black woman to represent the United Kingdom at the 2021 59th annual Venice Biennale. She was chosen by the British Council to produce a major solo exhibition. The British Council’s director of visual arts, Emma Dexter, claimed Boyce’s inclusive and powerful work will be a perfect selection for this significant time in UK history. Boyce first attended the Biennale in 2015, she was a part of curator Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Features exhibition.
https://www.afterall.org/article/sonia-boyce-reclassifying-classification
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/sonia-boyce-a-revolutionary-face-of-contemporary-british-art
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/sonia-boyce-ra
https://www.simonleegallery.com/artists/277-sonia-boyce/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Boyce
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sonia-boyce-how-do-we-return-to-history-and-to-its-ghosts-gfzbx5vts
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/sonia-boyce-a-revolutionary-face-of-contemporary-british-art
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/boyce-missionary-position-ii-t05020
