I have to thank SuAndi at National Black Arts Alliance (NBAA) for this week introducing me to the wonderful work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) is a British fine artist born to Ghanaian parents in London. Her artistic practice is mainly in large-scale, oil on canvas, figurative portraits of fictional people. Her artworks can command auction prices in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

She attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools.

Yiadom-Boakye has been represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery since 2010 when she had her first solo show entitled, Essays and Documents.

In 2013, she was a finalist for the Turner Prize. She was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 2018. The following year, Yiadom-Boakye was included in Ghana’s inaugural pavilion at the 57^th Venice Biennale.

As well as her own practice, she currently lectures part-time at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford.

Her works can be found in the collections of institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) amongst others.

I work from scrapbooks, I work from images I collect, I work from life a little bit, I seek out the imagery I need. I take photos. All of that is then composed on the canvas.

Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore, I’ve never felt the need to explain its presence in the work anymore than I’ve felt the need to explain my presence in the world, however often I’m asked. I’ve never liked being told who I am, how I should speak, what to think and how to think it. I’ve never needed telling.

It isn’t so much about placing black people in the canon as it is about saying that we’ve always been here, we’ve always existed, self-sufficient, outside of nightmares and imaginations, pre and post “discovery”, and in no way defined or limited by who sees us.

I don’t use black pigment… It completely deadens things. I use a mixture of brown and blue instead.

The exhibition – Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night – is on at Tate Britain until 26^th February 2023. It assembles approximately 70 works created between 2003 and the present in the most extensive representation of the artist’s career to date.

Credits:
Jack Shainman Gallery | Tate