Book Discussion | “Hew Locke: Passages”

About this program

Join us for a lively discussion that celebrates a dazzling new monograph on the British artist Hew Locke, published by the Yale Center for British Art on the occasion of the exhibition Hew Locke: Passages. The most comprehensive account of Locke’s work to date, the book features an interview with this visionary artist and thematic essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary art, and showcases the remarkable breadth of the artist’s distinctive practice. 

Copies of the book, pre-signed by the artist, will be available for purchase for $75. 

About Hew Locke

Born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Hew Locke moved with his family to Georgetown, Guyana, in 1966—in time to witness the colony declare its independence from Britain. Locke returned to Britain in 1980 and emerged as an artist during the highly politicized environment of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. For more than three decades, Locke has used strategies of appropriation to reveal and upend the visual codes of imperialism. Incorporating multiple media including drawing, found objects, photography, and sculpture, Locke’s oeuvre has been described as “postcolonial baroque” that deconstructs and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty. In this rich, highly textured, and multilayered materiality, Locke’s work fuses the vernacular and formal traditions of his British and Guyanese heritage.

About Allie Biswas

Allie Biswas is a writer and editor based in London. She is the editor of Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic (March 2024), a volume of essays by the cultural critic Larry Neal, and coeditor of The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960–1980 (June 2021). Forthcoming publications include a catalogue of the United States Embassy’s art collection in London. 

Join the livestream, beginning at 12 am ET on October 7.