Hew Locke: Passages showcases three decades of work by an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of empire, power, and cultural entanglement.
New Haven, CT (August 8, 2025) — This fall, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will present a major exhibition on Hew Locke (b. 1959), the celebrated Guyanese British artist known for his vibrant, multilayered assemblages that explore the visual expressions and codes of power and the history and legacy of imperialism.
Opening October 2, 2025, Hew Locke: Passages will trace the evolution of Locke’s artistic practice, offering a comprehensive survey of his eclectic use of diverse media, including drawing, photography, and sculpture. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue will present nearly fifty works spanning more than three decades of the artist’s career, from his earliest charcoal drawings to his recent installations made with found and readymade objects, such as beads, sequins, and toys.
“We are excited to invite visitors to explore Hew Locke’s striking and thought-provoking works up close,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, and the exhibition’s curator. “He brings forward complex historical themes and relates them to present-day experience. The exhibition will take us on a journey into his vision of the world—dazzling, seductive, poignant, and sinister all at once.”
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Locke moved with his family to Georgetown, capital of the South American nation of Guyana, in 1966, as the country declared independence from Britain and began to form its own sovereign culture. Witnessing Guyana transition away from British colonial symbols and create a new national visual language left a lasting impression on the artist and informed his later practice. Navigating between Guyana and London, where he has lived since the late 1980s, Locke remains attuned to the experiences of migrants and diasporic communities and deeply invested in uncovering the effects of imperialism on contemporary life and society.
Highlights of Hew Locke: Passages include examples of Locke’s reworked historic share certificates, direct interventions into the very documents that made modern global market capitalism, and two of his Black equestrian “Ambassador” statues, which critique and reimagine public forms of commemoration. The exhibition will also feature Koh-i-noor (2005) and Veni Vidi Vici (2004), multimedia sculptures adorned with plastic swords, baby dolls, textiles, plastics, and artificial hair, which boldly reinterpret quintessential emblems of British royal and national power.
“This show, for me, is a meeting of personal and global histories,” said Hew Locke. “As a frequent visitor to the US, with strong family ties here, it is a special moment for me to be showing my work at the YCBA, where it will be in conversation with the historic work in their collection. It will be interesting for me to see work from different periods of my career alongside each other, and to try to imagine where the future trajectory of my work will take me.”
To mark Hew Locke: Passages, the YCBA will further showcase a site-specific installation of Locke’s acclaimed ship sculptures. For the duration of the exhibition, three of his multicolored ships—enduring motifs for the artist of connectivity and migration—will be suspended in the entrance court of the museum’s landmark Louis I. Kahn building, putting Locke’s singular voice into dialogue with the YCBA’s iconic modernist architecture.
From the moment visitors enter the museum, they will be immersed in the rich world of Hew Locke, where symbols of nation and empire, and the global movement of wealth, peoples, and culture are unraveled and remade in a unique ornamental language.
Hew Locke: Passages is organized by the Yale Center for British Art and curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director. The exhibition will be on view at the YCBA from October 2, 2025, through January 11, 2026, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, where it will be on view February 13 through May 24, 2026, and to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, where it will be on view June 21 through September 13, 2026.
About Hew Locke
Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959 and moved with his family to Georgetown, Guyana in 1966. He returned to Britain in 1980 and earned his BA in fine art from Falmouth School of Art in 1988 and an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1994. In 2022, he was elected a member of The Royal Academy of Arts, and the following year, received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Art.
Locke’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums in Britain and the US. In 2022, he was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to create a series of sculptures, Gilt, for the building’s storied façade. His large-scale installation The Procession, commissioned in 2022 for Tate Britain, was subsequently shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2023. In 2024, Locke curated What have we here? at the British Museum, a critically lauded exhibition that put items from the museum’s collection into conversation with his own art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Yale Center for British Art, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and Tate, London, among others. He lives in London.
Accompanying Publication
Published by the Yale Center for British Art, and distributed by Yale University Press, Hew Locke: Passages offers the first comprehensive examination of the innovative career of an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of colonial and postcolonial power. This richly illustrated catalogue is the first to showcase the full spectrum of Locke’s practice.
Co-edited by Martina Droth and Allie Biswas, the book includes essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars that situate Locke’s work within the context of colonial and postcolonial history and theory.
Related Programs
Please visit the YCBA's calendar for the most up-to-date information on the programs that will accompany Hew Locke: Passages. A highlight includes a public conversation between Hew Locke and Martina Droth on October 9, 2025.
About the Yale Center for British Art
Opened in 1977 through the generosity of Yale graduate and philanthropist Paul Mellon, the Yale Center for British Art holds the largest and most significant collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection spans more than five centuries and is the foundation for a museum uniquely focused on the histories, legacies, and shifting contexts of British art. Housed in a celebrated modernist building designed by Louis I. Kahn, the museum is situated on the Yale University campus in the city of New Haven. It is free and open to all.
General Information
The Yale Center for British Art is located at 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut. The museum is open Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm, and Sunday, 11 am – 5 pm. Between September and June, the museum offers late hours on Thursdays and is open 10 am – 7 pm.
The YCBA is closed Mondays and major holidays.
Press Contacts
Yale Center for British Art
ycba.press@yale.edu | +1 203 432 2856
Hanna Gisel, Hanna Gisel Communications
hanna@hannagisel.com | +1 716 866 5302
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