Donald Locke’s work was featured in the exhibition, Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.

The exhibition aimed to contend with the museum’s history, in which its founder, Richard Fitzwilliam, funded the creation of the museum with a family fortune amassed through the exportation and exploitation of African bodies, the transatlantic slave trade. 

As the first of a series of exhibition gallery interventions planned at the museum between 2023-2026, this exhibit showcases stories of black resilience and liberation through artwork and objects from West Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe in order to resist the harmful legacies of oppression that its founder represents while also emphasizing the ways in which artists and individuals created the culture of the Black Atlantic through their resistance to colonial slavery.

The exhibit has received many reviews from different media outlets, including The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Voice, and The Week Magazine, all of which investigate and describe Black Atlantic in its own way. 

Click on the titles above to read the articles for yourself!

Donald Locke’s artwork

Here are the artworks by Donald Locke that were featured in the exhibit:

Photos from the exhibit

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Donald Locke’s Dageraad from the Air has been installed in the last room (1965-1980) of the Walk Through British Art collection display.

Dageraad from the Air appears alongside the works of artists like Rasheed Araeen, Neil Kenlock, Cecilia Vicuña, Gavin Jantjes, Richard Long, and other. 

See the full list of works here. 

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The Met’s exhibit label describes it best: “Gilt is the third in a series of commissions for the Met’s historical facade. Borrowing the format of trophies—emblems of competitions and victory—Hew Locke created four sculptures that reflect on the exercise and representation of power. There works feature details inspired by objects in the Met collection, many rendered unfamiliar through appropriation, fragmentation, and recombination. Relying on an aesthetic of excess in keeping with its title, Gilt leverages the relationship between guilt and gold across 3,000 years of art history.”

Also see Holland Cotter’s article in the New York Times for more insight and a full breakdown of the four sculptures here. 

Read more from the Met’s Press Release on the facade niches here. 

“At once visually stunning and critically incisive, Locke’s practice relied on the strategy of appropriation and an aesthetic of excess and theatricality to deconstruct iconographies of power and to explore global histories of conquest, migration, and exchange.”

– The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Watch Hew Locke’s interview about Gilt below:

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The Procession by Hew Locke, Donald Locke’s son, is on view until January 2023 at Tate Britain. This commissioned work which Hew created specifically for the Tate encourages viewers to “reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power” by immersing them in the procession.

As Tate Britain explains, “A procession is part and parcel of the cycle of life; people gather and move together to celebrate worship, protest, mourn, escape or even to better themselves.”

With around 150 handmade, individually designed figures that cross space and time, Locke blurs the line between past, present, and even future, examining and asserting the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and the sugar industry at Tate Britain, while inevitably pushing viewers to reexamine their own participation in such systems of oppression.

As the Guardian explains, “The Procession unpacks some of this problematic history, as well as taking Caribbean carnival, the story of post-colonial trade, empire and the current environmental disaster in its stride. Past and present collide and intermingle, throwing up echoes and asides. A mix of Junkanoo and Guyanese Mashramani carnivals, protest and celebration, defiance and redress, The Procession is endlessly captivating and overwhelming.”

Artwork by both Donald Locke and Hew Locke were also featured in Tate Britain’s adjoining gallery in the Life Between Islands exhibit, which was on view through April 2, 2022. 

The Procession is on view from March 22, 2022 – January 22, 2023. 

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The exhibit explored the contributions of black artists in Scotland’s culture and was created in response to the “whiteness” of existing Scottish art history narratives. 

By bringing together post-1960s art that draws on conversations around race, empire, independence and post-colonial legacies, including the works of Locke and Aubrey Williams, the exhibit achieved one of its main goals, as outlined by its curators: “to bring the AfroScots artists, their work and life stories together, and to give them a local, accessible home for future audiences, arts practitioners and researchers.”

Read the full review for the exhibit here. 

Also see co-curator Tiffany Boyle present on her work archiving Caribbean artists in diasporic spaces here. 

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Donald Locke’s work was showcased at the 2022 FOG Art Fair in San Francisco, CA, and was represented by the Jenkins Johnson Gallery. 

The two pieces (right) demonstrate some of Locke’s most innovative styles, including his mixed media ceramics and mixed media collages. 

Especially given that Donald’s time in Arizona in the 1970s and 80s had such a huge impact on his artistic career, the Donald Locke Studio was excited for his presence on this major West Coast exhibit. 

The Jenkins Johnson Gallery put together a press packet for the fair that you can find here or on the Publications & Media Page for more information. 

You can also find more photos of the installation and of the other artists represented on this Jenkins Johnson Gallery website page. 

The fair was on view January 19 – 23, 2022. 

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The Tate Britain exhibition, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art, 1950s-Now, included Donald Locke’s work as part of its exploration of over four generations of Caribbean-British artists. With art from more than forty artists whose works spanned various media including film, photography, painting, sculpture, and fashion, the exhibit was among the first of its kind to engage the stories of Caribbean-British art with so much depth in a major national museum. Locke’s work from the Tate Britain collection, Plantation K/140, Trophies of Empire, and Dageraad from the Air, were featured in the exhibition. 

As one review from The Guardian put it, the Tate Britain exhibition, Life Between Islands, is “exhilarating, mighty, radical, tender, as disturbing as it is beautiful… a revelation from first to last.”

About Donald’s work, the article explained, “His work is superb. Growing up at a time when the plantation system still existed, he later made an indelible image of his local countryside titled Dageraad from the Air. At a distance it might be an abstract canvas, entirely dark—even a pastiche of Ad Reinhardt’s all-black paintings—until you approach. Squares of blackened canvas, partitioned by sharp metal tacks and a cage-like grille, condense both the tortured history and the topography of the land below.”

As another review from Artlyst Magazine described, “Life Between Islands is a landmark exhibition at Tate Britain exploring the extraordinary breadth of Caribbean-British art over four generations. It will be the first time a major national museum has told this story in-depth, showcasing 70 years of culture, experiences and ideas expressed through art, from visionary paintings to documentary photography.”

To find more content and reviews related to this exhibit, please see the Publications and Media page. 

 You can also purchase a copy of the exhibition book from the Tate Britain Shop or Amazon. 

On view December 1, 2021 – April 3, 2022. 

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Maximillian William Gallery, London, presented Exploratory Drawings, an exhibition featuring drawings and photographs from sculptors and filmmakers. Though these artists have been best known for their interventions in space, this exhibition offered a different perspective on their practices by presenting inventive works in the two-dimensional plane. These were not designs or documentation, but autonomous works of art which were inextricably linked to the artists’ better-known pieces through the reiteration of themes across media. 

“Donald Locke’s sculptural ceramics draw from his lived experience, from his childhood in what was then the colony of British Guiana to training as an artist in Britain and ultimately leaving to find new opportunities in America. Likewise, his series of Pork Knocker drawings stem from personal and cultural history, telling the stories of prospectors—among them Locke’s father—on the hunt for diamonds and gold on the alluvial plains of Guyana. While it was a way to make a living in a Guyana emerging into independence, this goldrush was not without its dangers—represented in Locke’s foreboding drawings—and indicative of a wide history of colonialism and its legacy. 

The exhibition was on display until February 26, 2022. 

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Donald Locke was represented at the 2021 Miami Basel Art Fair by Jenkins-Johnson Gallery of San Francisco and Brooklyn, a Black-owned, female-founded gallery. 

The Jenkins-Johnson Gallery joined the fair this year along with a number of other gallery spaces underrepresented in the art world. In fact, according to the NYTimes, this has been one of the Miami Basel Art Fair’s most diverse years yet.

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The Tate Britain acquired two of Locke’s works. One was the mixed media painting, Dageraad from the Air, and the other was the mixed media sculpture, Plantation K/140. 

Below are shots of Dageraad from the Air in the Tate Britain’s Painting Conservation Department as the museum’s team prepared to clean it. 

Dageraad from the Air appeared in multiple exhibitions since the 1970s, including the 2016 posthumous exhibition at the Skoto Gallery, Donald Locke: The Plantation Series, and the 1989 major survey exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain.

Both Dageraad from the Air and Plantation K/140 were later featured in the Tate’s exhibit, Life Between Islands. 

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