In Conversation: Lubaina Himid

Image: Lubaina Himid, Six Tailors, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 77 1/2 x 106 5/8 inches (197 x 271 centimeters). Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Artwork © Lubaina Himid. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photograph by Gavin Renshaw.

 
Join us for a conversation between the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize artist Lubaina Himid and Eddie Chambers, art historian and the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Both leading figures from the Black British art movement of the 1980s, Himid and Chambers will discuss their shared history, as well as Himid’s exhibition in Austin and her wider practice. This important conversation will be moderated by Dr. Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Founding Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies.

The talk coincides with Lubaina Himid’s solo exhibition Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend, on view at The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center (March 1 - July 21, 2024). The museum galleries will open at 12P for visitors to see the show before and after the program. Arrive early to grab your seat and enjoy complimentary refreshments.

For accommodation requests, please email [email protected].

 
Thank you to our promotional partner Art Galleries at Black Studies.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Lubaina Himid Artist Portrait © Magda Stawarska

Lubaina Himid (born 1954, Zanzibar; lives and works in Preston, UK) is the recipient of the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which is envisioned as a transformative award for the artist and the Austin community. Throughout a career spanning four decades, Himid has explored and expanded the possibilities of painting and storytelling to depict contemporary everyday life and to fill gaps in art history through the depiction and centering of Black figures and experiences. Self-described as a painter, cultural activist, witness, storyteller, and historian, Himid was an especially influential figure within the British Black arts movement in the 1980s, and has been a champion of women artists in her role as a teacher, curator, critic, and organizer. Since winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017, she has gained wider visibility and increased international recognition for her work. 

Portrait courtesy of Dr. Eddie Chambers

Dr. Eddie Chambers is holder of the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been professionally involved in the visual arts for four decades first as an artist, then as a writer of art criticism and art curator. More recently, since the early 2000s moving into academia, first as a Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, before going on, in 2010 to a position at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his PhD at Goldsmiths College University of London, working under Professor Sarat Maharaj. His external examiner was Professor Stuart Hall. His doctorate concerned itself with press and other responses to a new generation of Black British artists who emerged in the 1980s. He takes as his broad areas of scholarship the art and art history of the African Diaspora. Chambers has written several books, namely Run Through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers, London: inIVA - The institute of International Visual Arts, 1999; Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi Editions, 2012; Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s, I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London and New York, Series: International Library of Visual Culture, 2014, reprinted, September 2015; Roots & Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain, I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London and New York, Series: International Library of Visual Culture, 2017; World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021.

Chambers has worked with a great many artists over the course of several decades, including Eugene Palmer, Cybil Charlier, Frank Bowling, Denzil Forrester, Barbara Walker and Alberta Whittle. His peer review texts, and other forms of writing have been published widely and include “T’waunii Sinclair, and the Ongoing Cultural Life of the Machete”, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art (Nka#51, published in November 2022: 112 - 127); ‘Accentuating Latin American Art’s African Dimensions’ text for Dialogues: Afterlives and Different Futures for Latin American Art, convened by George Flaherty & Adele Nelson, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (University of California Press) Volume 4, Issue 2 (April 2022) 95-106; “Zippin’ up my boots, going back to my routes”, part of Book discussion: Hazel V. Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, that appeared in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (Duke University Press). Number 64, Number 4, 2021: 187-197; and “It’s Time to Share”, text for Panorama, Anne Monahan and Isabel L. Taube (eds.), “Self-Criticality,” Colloquium, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of CAA's Art Journal.

Photo courtesy Dr. Cherise Smith

Dr. Cherise Smith is Chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies at Black Studies Collective and Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the award-winning author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020) which places the artist’s work in the context of the 1990s, the rise in collecting of Black “memorabilia,” and Pop art as well as Enacting Others: the Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, Nikki S. Lee, and Adrian Piper (Duke University Press, 2011). Curator, culture-worker, and art historian, Dr. Smith is the Founding Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies, the only museum dedicated to Black art on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent exhibition, Old Wounds, Dark Dreams, featured works by artists Carrie Mae Weems, Cauleen Smith, Rodney McMillian, and Charles Gaines who are also the subjects of her current book project.