Lubaina Himid

Abstract

Dr Omar Kholeif maps out the life and practice of the path-breaking British-artist, Lubaina Himid RA CBE (born, Zanzibar 1954) through a considered engagement of her multivalent creative output—in visual art, writing, and exhibition-making. A leading figure in the British Black Arts Movement, Himid is renowned for her narrative paintings, which interrogate historical representations of Black people’s creativity—from the eighteenth century to the present day. Painted canvasses, cut-out figures, drawers, and found carts find home in exhibitions that reveal the artist’s engagement with opera, performance, and architecture. Kholeif notes that Himid’s expressions have heralded a distinct re-formulation of Black visuality, achieved through a re-imagining of Black life—framed through the lens of the present. In “Do You Want an Easy Life?” Kholeif pays special attention to the artist’s collaborative art making and argues that through these forays that Himid is concerned with “making space” for what official record and history often elides. Kholeif argues that Himid’s artistic realm is constructed through a form of “female worlding” that presages an intertextual palette for art and its history—one which demands crucial revision.