Sonia Boyce

Dame Sonia Dawn Boyce (born 1962 ) is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator who lives and works in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator".

In March 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, becoming the first black female Royal Academician since the academy's founding in 1768.

In February 2020, Boyce was selected by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2022, the first black woman to do so. In April 2022, Boyce won the Venice Biennale's top Golden Lion prize with her work Feeling Her Way.

Early life and education Born in Islington, London, in 1962, Boyce attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town, East London, from 1973 to 1979. From 1979 to 1980, she completed a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology, going on to earn a BA degree in Fine Art at Stourbridge College from 1980 to 1983 in the West Midlands. She gained prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s. Her work also references feminism. Roy Exley (2001) has written: "The effect of her work has been to re-orientate and re-negotiate the position of Black or Afro-Caribbean art within the cultural mainstream."

Boyce has said that she is influenced by the work of Sophie Calle, Adrian Piper, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Lygia Clark, David Medalla, Art & Language, Stephen Willats, Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacey.

An early exhibition in which Boyce participated was in 1983 at the Africa Centre, London, entitled Five Black Women. Her early works were large chalk-and-pastel drawings depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. Drawing from her background she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean. Through this work, the artist examined her position as a Black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience was rooted. She also took part in the 1983 exhibition Black Women Time Now.

In 1989, Boyce was one of four female artists selected for an exhibition called The Other Story, which was the first display of British African, Caribbean, and Asian Modernism. As part of one of these events, the artists decided to temporarily remove J. W. Waterhouse's painting Hylas and the Nymphs from the gallery wall, prompting a wide discussion of issues of censorship and curatorial decision-making, interpretation and judgement, by gallery audiences and in the media.

Boyce has taught widely and uses workshops as part of her creative process, and her works can be seen in many national collections. Boyce's works are held in the collections of Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, British Council and the Arts Council Collection at the Southbank Centre.

In 2018, she was the subject of the BBC Four documentary film Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain's Hidden Art History, in which Brenda Emmanus followed Boyce as she travelled the UK, highlighting the history of Black artists and modernism. Boyce led a team in preparing an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery that focused on artists of African and Asian descent who have played a part in shaping the history of British art. Her piece, Feeling Her Way, was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2022 exhibition.

Boyce produced Newham Trackside Wall (2021) a frieze comprising documentary photography of the buildings and streets of three neighbourhoods in Newham, a floral pattern inspired by the plants and wildlife in the local area and elements of over 300 testimonies that were collected by Boyce from 2017 to 2018. As part of the project, young people were trained in oral history to help Boyce collect these testimonies, a pub quiz was held as a way to prompt stories to be told and people could also contribute stories online. Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours, all for services to art.

On 9 March 2016, Boyce was elected as a member of the Royal Academy.

Art market Boyce is represented by Hauser & Wirth and APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia, Italy.

Personal life Boyce's partner is curator David A. Bailey, with whom she has two daughters.

In February 2023, Boyce appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

Medium In her early artistic years, Boyce used chalk and pastel to make drawings of her friends, family and herself. She graduated later to incorporate photography, graphic design, film, and caricature to convey very political messages within her work. The incorporation of collage allowed her to explore more complex pieces. Boyce's utilization of caricature within her work. The caricature is historically meant to showcase exaggerated features of individuals. They are often grotesque and can incite negative perceptions of their subjects. By using caricatures, Boyce allows herself to reclaim them in her own image.

Message

"Boyce's work is politically affiliated. She utilizes a variety of mediums within the same work to convey messages revolving around Black representation, perceptions of the black body and pervasive notions that arose from scientific racism. Within her bodies of work, Boyce works to convey the personal isolation that results from being black in a white society. In her work she explores notions of the Black Body as the "other". Commonly, she uses collage to convey a body of art that incites a complicated history. Boyce rose as a prominent artist in the 1980s when the Black Cultural Renaissance took place. The movement arose out of opposition to Margaret Thatcher's brand of conservatism and her cabinet's policies. Using this societal backdrop, Boyce takes conventional narratives surrounding the black body and turns it upside down. Through her art she conveys a hope to overturn ethnographic notions of race that pervaded throughout slavery and after the slaves had been emancipated. Griot Girlz: Feminist Art and the Black Atlantic, Kunstlerhaus Büchenhausen, Innsbruck (2010) Play! Re-capturing the Radical Imagination, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 7 (2013) All the World's Futures, 56th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice (2015)

Selected awards and recognition

2007: appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, for services to art 2016: elected to the Royal Academy of Arts 2004–2005: Artist Fellow, NESTA 2008–2011: Research Fellow, Wimbledon College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. AHRC funded research project on the ephemeral nature of collaborative practice in art, concluding in the project The Future is Social.

Selected publications Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues, London: Kala Press, 1997. Annotations 2/Sonia Boyce: Performance (ed. Mark Crinson, Iniva – the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998) In 2007, Boyce, David A. Bailey and Ian Baucom jointly received the History of British Art Book Prize (USA) for the edited volume Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva and AAVAA. Allison Thompson, "Sonia Boyce and Crop Over", Small Axe, Volume 13, Number 2, 2009. Boyce co-edited the summer 2021 issue of Art History on Black British Modernism with Dorothy Price. John Roberts, "Interview with Sonia Boyce", Third Text, no. 1 (Autumn 1987), 55–64 Sonia Boyce, "Talking in Tongues", in Storms of the Heart, edited by Kwesi Owusu Facsimile of letter by Sonia Boyce in Veronica Ryan's: Compartments/Apart-ments