Donald Lock: Resistance form The retrospective exhibition will open at 6pm on May 31st, and will be on display until September 7th, 2025. Spike Island (133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6ux, UK). The exhibition is open to the public for free.
The exhibition will include the publication of a new monograph, available on July 24th, with Hew Locke participating. Panel Discussion About his father’s work on Spike Island. The exhibition will take a tour of Ikon Gallery and Camden Art Centre.
explanation: Spike Island presents the first major research exhibition of Guyanese-British Artist Donald Locke (1930–2010). Rock was born and raised in Guyana and first moved to the UK in the 1950s, studying at the Bath Academy of Art and the Edinburgh School of Art. He then lived between London and Georgetown for the next 20 years before settling in the United States in the late 1970s.
The exhibition at Spike Island explores the development of his work in Guyana, the UK and the US over 50 years, from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. It features over 80 works from early ceramics that evoke human and natural forms, from mixed media sculptures and monochromatic black paintings of the 1970s. It also includes several large-scale paintings from the 1990s, incorporating images discovered along with ceramic, metal and wood elements. These materials reflect Locke’s evolutionary approach to the use of different media following his move to the US, his formal ingenuity and the growing influence of African American art and iconography.
Locke lived and worked in many places during his life, but his quest for the issues of history, identity and conquest was constant. This is evident in his use of forms and symbols that reflect the legacy of colonialism in his hometown of Guyana and the racial politics of the American civil war. But more than anything, Locke wanted to give shape and visibility to the unique and hybrid contribution to the modernity of black culture.
Donald Rock Growing up in Guyana, in 1947 Guyana artist Edward Rupert Burrows attended the Workers Art Class (WPAC) taught in Georgetown.
Locke returned to Guyana in 1964 and became an art master at Queen’s College in Georgetown, where he taught until 1969. He then returned to Edinburgh School of Art to study pottery before moving to London from 1970 to 1978. In 1979, Locke was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Sculpture at Arizona State University. He lived in Phoenix, Arizona until 1990, before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where he lived until his death in 2010. [. . .]
For more information, please refer https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/donald-locke/
For more information about the panel discussion, see https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/events/donald-locke-panel-discussion/
[Shown above: “A Conspiracy of Icons (Icons from the New World), 1992-93.]
