Donald Locke

1930
Born in Stewartville, Demerara County, Guyana, South America . Second son of carpenter Donald Locke and primary school teacher ivy Mae (nee Harper). Locke, Sr., among the top furniture makers on the western Atlantic coast, later sought gold as a pork-knocker­ a term coined from prospectors' staple food-and earned the legendary moniker Dunnamite Dan for his great axe-wielding skill in building a float to save his crew following a shipwreck.

1938
Family moves to Georgetown, Guyana. Attends Bourda Roman Catholic School and Smith's Church Congregational School.

1944-46
Achieves qualifying level at primary school, passes scholarship exam and receives partial scholarship to Progressive High School . Leaves in 1946 with a University of Cambridge Junior Overseas School Certificate. Headmaster Carleton Robinson of the Broad Street Government School (now Dolphin Government School ) accepts Locke as a pupil-teacher as a favor to former colleague Ivy Mae Locke. (A common practice, principals taught apprentices how to teach and prepared them for their compulsory exams.) Locke feels he has no skill for drawing-one of the subjects requiring a passing grade-and so Locke takes lessons from the school's art teacher Agnes Jones.

1947
Attends the second session of the Working Peoples' Free Art Class offered by local artist E.R. Burrowes to further develop his drawing. Locke is profoundly impacted by the charismatic personality of the teacher.

1947-54
Earns a Teacher's Certificate from the Guyana Ministry of Education in 1950. Contributes annually to Working People's Art Class (WPAC) exhibitions, from which title "Free" is dropped. Serves for a time as WPAC's secretary, assisting in organizing outdoor and traveling shows in Berbice County. Major sale of a small painting to Anthony Haynes (of an English family from Barbados, later highly regarded for his association in the 1950s with writers of the Caribbean Artists' Movement in London). In 1952, wins WPAC's First Prize Gold Medal Award for abstract painting The Happy Family.

1954-57
Awarded a British Council Scholarship to Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, England; earns a Teaching Certificate in Art Education with a Supplementary Certificate in the Visual Arts with Museum and Drama (equivalent to a B.A.). Studies painting under William Scott and Bryan Wynter; pottery under James Tower; and sculpture under Ken Armitage and Bernard Meadows, from whom he absorbs the doctrine of vitalism. Tower's pottery, conceived as part of this tradition, has a long-lasting and decisive influence on Locke's bronze and ceramic work. Earns scholarship from the Guyana Department of Education for third year at Bath Academy (1956-57).

1957-59
Returns to Georgetown; teaches art at Dolphin Government School and WPAC; exhibits annually with WPAC. Organizes exhibition of drawings and watercolors as well as The Teacher and the Child at the Carnegie Library. The latter includes works by teachers who took Locke's art classes shown alongside those by children they themselves taught.

1958
Continues his association with Burrowes, now regarded as the father of art in Guyana. Marries Leila Chaplin, a fellow Corsham student and teacher at St. Joseph 's Roman Catholic Girls School. Lacking conventional pottery-making facilities, he successfully fires large earthenware, coiled pots using a sawdust­ fired, dust bin kiln based -on experiments first seen at Corsham.

1959
Awarded Abstract Painting of the Year by Guyanese Art Group Annual Exhibition for his painting Introductory lines to Milton's L'allegro. First child, Hew Locke, born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1959-64
Receives Government Ministry of Education award to study for M.A. honors degree in fine arts (equivalent to Ph.D.) at Edinburgh University. While at Edinburgh College of Art, he meets and works with American artists, including Dave Cohen, Sheldon Kaganof and Dion Myers from California, at the time when the influence of the Californiaclay movement first appears in Britain. It takes some time before this new thinking, linked to the New York abstract expressionist movement, makes an impression. When it does, it completely eclipses the Corsham tradition and the pervading influence of Moore's vitalism. The technical and philosophical thinking of the now historic clay revolution of California are the most significant influences governing studio production until arrival in Atlanta , Georgia , in 1990.

1961
Receives Lowenstein Fellowship to attend conference at the Institution for the Documentation of Dutch Art History in The Hague, Netherlands .

1962-63
Second child, Jonathan Locke, born in Edinburgh (1962). Receives Edinburgh University grants for historical research in Florence and Ravenna, Italy. Organizes an exhibition of West Indian and Guyanese art at the Paperback Gallery and meets fellow Guyanese artist Frank Bowling on a visit to London, England , to borrow one of his works for the exhibition.

1964
Completes graduate thesis analyzing versions of the portrait of Sebastian Vrancx from the Centum Icon's, The Iconography of Van Dyck, ca. 1645-49. Returns to Georgetown to be Art Master at Queen's College. Lacking facilities for making ceramics, turns back to painting. Third child, Corinne Locke, born.

1966-68
Guyana gains independence (1966). With wife Leila, Dudley Charles, Philip Moore and Judy Drayton (later Judy Craig, chief sculptor at Madame Tussauds in London ), forms "The 1967 Group." Curates one-person exhibitions of paintings by Judy Craig and Leila Locke at the John F. Kennedy Library. Drafts master plan for a Festival of Child Art sponsored by the Guyana branch of the Society for Childhood Education. Holds two group exhibitions (1967 and 1968) at the British Council and the John F. Kennedy Libraries. Ministry of Foreign Affairs purchases painting to donate to Brazilian government on the occasion of establishing diploma is relations with that country.

1969
Sponsored by British Council Bursary, takes leave from Queen's College to do private research in ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art. Organizes exhibition of paintings by Queen's College students there.

1970
Makes Easter visit to Brazil on fellowship from Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Exhibits large biomorphic ceramic sculptures made while at Edinburgh in group exhibition at Camden Arts Center under pseudonym Issorosano Ite. Resigns from Queen's College and returns to live in London.

1971-78
Initial works produced inthe London studio come out of the vitalist tradition. Teaches ceramics at various schools and colleges in England, including Chester College of Art (1972-73). Donald Bowen, Director of the Art Gallery of the Commonwealth Institute, coins the term "mixed media ceramics" to describe work in 1975 solo exhibition there. Work consists in part of biomorphic forms in ceramics and cast aluminum; other pieces are constructed of metal, wood, leather, fur and ceramics. These include the Plantation Series, a sculptural metaphor for the corrosive plantation system of labor, wealth and social structure. Serves as guest artist at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine i 1976 on his first visit to the United States. Returns the following year to give workshop in experimental sculpture and meets Randy Schmidt, a professor at the Graduate School of Ceramics at Arizona State University in Tempe, also teaching there. Their instant bond results in an invitation to be ASU guest artist when possible.

1979
Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture. Accepts Schmidt's offer and is given studio in graduate ceramics department. Arrives in September and is introduced to Southwest culture his first night there by a midnight visit to a Yaqui burial ground. Geographical and cultural differences between Georgetown, London and Arizona are staggering to Locke.

1980
First bronze sculptures are cast by Arizona Bronze Foundry, beginning a long-lasting association. Working there on his own pieces emphasizes his departure from ceramics; he studies, learns everything possible about and experiments with bronze casting. Largest piece eventually cast is Timehri Bird, six feet tall, commissioned by the shipping company that brought his studio contents from England to Arizona.

1981-83
During this introductory bronze period, an overheard remark ("nobody makes nudes any more") leads to a return to a stylized figurative sculpture for the first time since 1964. Divorces Leila and marries Brenda Stephenson of Shropshire, England, an art consultant in Scottsdale, Arizona. U.S. permanent residency is granted. Begins writing on art as the Arizona correspondent for Artspace Magazine, a quarterly contemporary arts magazine published in Albuquerque , New Mexico . Also writes weekly reviews for New Tim's, a weekly Phoenix, Arizona, newspaper, and occasionally for Arizona Living and Arts Magazine of New York. The focus of criticism is the astonishing vitality of the current Southwest art. His article on Arizona painter Merrill Mahaffey, "The Art of Synthetic Realism," is judged by the Chicago Art Examiner (Spring 1982) as best article of all art magazines reviewed. Moves to Phoenix in 1983.

1986
Makes first visit to the Art Fair at Navy Pier in Chicago , Illinois , and is stunned by the architecture and vitality of the city. Meets ceramics writer Susan Peterson and Crafts Horizons writer/editor Rose Siivka.

1987
Teaches bronze casting for one semester at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The human head-the class subject-inspires the execution of a series of portraits ranging from two inches tall to over life-size.

1988-89
During his second visit to the Art Fair in Chicago, Locke has extremely influential talks with painter Janice Hightower and the young African American art dealer Derek Beard. Returning to Phoenix, he makes a decisive shift to painting after 10 years spent almost exclusively as a three-dimensional artist. Invited to participate in an exhibition curated by Rasheed Araeen at the Hayward Gallery in London that features works by African, Asian and Caribbean artists living in Britain since the end of World War Il.

1990
Moves to Atlanta, Georgia. Encountering the work of the African American vernacular artists of the Southeast, familiarly referred to as "Souls Grown Deep," further frees Locke from what he now views as an alien inheritance, i.e. the academic legacy of European civilization. The acrylic, collage and mixed media works begun after the second Chicago trip evolve into large paintings using heavy paint, photographs and Xerox copies of selected magazine clippings, material, wood, metal, found objects and other found materials mounted on canvas.

1992-93
Receives a five-year grant for one of 12 studios at NEXUS and takes up sculpture again. Participates in Atlanta Biennial and 20th anniversary celebrations at NEXUS, renamed Atlanta Contemporary.

1996
Submits six models and one i accepted for commission to execute one of 12' public sculptures for CODA (Commission for Olympic Development of Atlanta). The models consist of totemic arrangements of a variety of three-dimensional shapes in wax, some of which have been in the studio for at least 10 years. After the sculpture is completed and installed, experimenting with new arrangements of these shapes continues. As in London when he added other media and materials to the basic clay to create mixed media ceramics, now other media and materials are added to the wax to make new shapes, forms and personages. These creations bring back long-buried images and narratives from the vernacular culture of Guyanese folk. Some of the materials, such as leather, fur, snakeskin,, African utensils, bush rope from the Guyana forest, exotic woods, found metal, ceramic objects and dried twigs and branches from old trees have been in the studio for as long as 30 years.

2002
First major showing of the new sculptures at Solomon Projects in Atlanta. Favorable reviews locally as well as in Art Papers and Sculpture International.

2003
A retrospective exhibition in Atlanta sponsored by the Bureau of Cultural Affairs consists of sculptures and paintings done there over the past 13 years.