Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic by Richard Hylton

Wednesday 19 March 2025, 6.30pm, Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre (BGLT), SOAS

Followed by refreshments.

Introduction

Dr Ida Hadjivayanis- SOAS, London.

Chair

Dr Indie Choudhury-Courtauld Institute.

Respondents:

Professor Eddie Chambers, University of Texas at Austin.

Dr Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani, University of Edinburgh.

About the book

Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was one of the most gifted, perceptive, and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic is the first book-length study of a protean practice which spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, and new technologies.

Richard Hylton, Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic, 2025, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, HB, 304pp, 48 colour & 27 bw illus, ISBN9781350228467

About Contributors

Eddie Chambers gained his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1998. He has curated a number of exhibitions, having worked with artists such as Denzil Forrester and Frank Bowling. He joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010 where he is now holder of the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Art History. His books include Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain (2012), Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s, (2014, reissued 2015), and Roots & Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain (2017). His most recent book is World is Africa: Writings on Diaspora Art (2021). He is the editor of the recently published Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History.

Indie A. Choudhury is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in the art, sonic, and literary cultures of the Black Atlantic. She is currently working on the first monograph of Frank Bowling’s White Paintings as a body of work spanning more than six decades of his career, based upon her PhD thesis from Stanford University. Recent and forthcoming publications include Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin published by Duke University Press and on Hew Locke published by Yale University Press. Recent exhibitions include In Praise of Black Errantry with Unit London at the Venice Biennale 2024. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art with the Courtauld’s Center for American Art, the Yale Centre for British Art, Stanford Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Richard Hylton has since the early 1990s organised a wider variety of exhibitions including those by Barbara Walker, Louder Than Words (2006) and Sub-Urban: New Drawings (2015), Magdalene Odundo: Transition II (2016), and Eugene Palmer Didn’t it Rain: New Paintings (2018). His first book was The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of policies, initiatives and attitudes 1976-2006 (2007). His research and writing have appeared in journals and publications in the US and UK including The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and the forthcoming exhibition publication Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, The Menil Collection, Houston (2025).

Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani is Lecturer in History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, specialising in modern and contemporary art of the global diasporas, currently focussing on the postcolonial histories of African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Black British art in Britain and beyond. As a postdoctoral research associate at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven Connecticut, she co-curated the exhibition Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction (2022). She has held numerous curatorial positions, including at the Wichita Art Museum, Ulrich Museum of Art, in Wichita, Kansas, USA; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; and Tate Liverpool, UK. Maryam has published widely on diasporic artists including Denis Williams, Frank Bowling, and the Caribbean Artists Movement. Her current research project examines the visual construction of the 'Commonwealth,' reflected or criticised in art practices, films and exhibitions produced in Britain and the Commonwealth between 1948-1978.

Image: Donald Rodney, Flame of the Soul (detail) mixed media, 1988. Courtesy of the Donald Rodney Estate.