Sonia Boyce was born to Afro-Caribbean parents, who had come to the UK in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation, in Islington , London, England in 1962. Considered one of the foremost artists of the Black British Art movement of the 1980s, Boyce's work, across a wide range of media and collaborative experience, examines issues of race, class, and gender, particularly with respect to the development of Black British identity in the later twentieth century. In 2022, as the first Black woman to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, Boyce was awarded the top prize, the Golden Lion for her multi-media installation, 'Feeling Her Way'.
Artist Sonia Boyce was born to Afro-Caribbean parents in Islington, London, England in 1962. Her mother was from Barbados, and her father was from Guyana, and they met in London having arrived in the 1950s as part of the Windrush generation. She attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town, before enrolling on a Foundation Course in Art and Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology in 1979. Having begun drawing as a child, Boyce’s early work was influenced by feminist artists Margaret Harrison, Kate Walker and Monica Ross and utilised an assemblage of texts, photographs, drawings and magazine clippings. In 1980 she began a BA in Fine Art at Stourbridge College but, ‘It was very clear that I was somehow out of place’ (Charlotte Higgins, ‘The vitriol was really unhealthy’: artist Sonia Boyce on the row over taking down Hylas and the Nymphs, The Guardian, 2018). In 1982 she attended the first national conference of Black artists where she met Tanzanian-born painter Lubaina Himid, Eddie Chambers, and Horace Ové. The following year Himid asked Boyce to participate in an exhibition at the Africa Centre, London entitled Five Black Women. Key works from this period include Big Women's Talk (1984), Auntie Enid – The Pose (1985) and Missionary Position II (1985), which addressed issues of race and gender in everyday life through large pastel drawings and photographic collages. Using watercolour, pastel and crayon on paper, Missionary Position II explores conflicting opinions on religious beliefs across different generations and cultures in Britain. The artist used herself as the model for the two figures, inspired by the self-referential work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. According to art historian Anjalie Dalal-Clayton, Boyce’s work was subsequently influenced by the work of feminist multimedia artist and performer, Susan Hiller, and by Donald G. Rodney, part of the BLK Art Group, whose first exhibition Black Art An’ Done was shown at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1984. In 1985, Himid selected some of Boyce's works for an exhibition she curated at the ICA titled The Thin Black Line. The following year Boyce's work featured in the seminal exhibition, The Other Story curated by Rasheed Araeen at the Hayward Gallery and, when Boyce was only 25, in 1987, Tate acquired Missionary Position II, making her the first British Black female artist to be represented in the collection. Boyce is considered one of the foremost artists of the Black British Art movement of the 1980s.
Since the 1990s, in Boyce’s own words, her ‘art practice has relied on working with other people in collaborative and participatory situations, often demanding of those collaborators spontaneity and unrehearsed performative actions. Working across media, mainly drawing, print, photography, video and sound, I recoup the remains of these performative gestures – the leftovers, the documentation – to make the art works, which are often concerned with the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator’ (Sonia Boyce, UAL). In 1995 she made an intervention in the ‘Cultures’ gallery in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in which vitrines were converted into translucent cases with thin coloured paper. By converting the display into a series of ‘peep shows’, she emphasised the element of voyeurism in the museum's presentation of ‘other’ cultures. Between 1996–2002, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of East London, Boyce was a Director of AAVAA (African and Asian Visual Artists Archive), managing a Research Centre on contemporary artists of African and Asian descent working in the UK. From 2004–2005 she was a NESTA Artist Fellow (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), researching the social dynamics of collaboration in art. In 2007, Boyce, with 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 (Institute of International Visual Arts) and AAVAA, and in the same year she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Between 2008–2011, Boyce completed an AHRC Research Fellowship on the ephemeral nature of collaborative practice in art at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, with a concluding project ‘The Future is Social’ (2011).
In 2016 Boyce was elected a member of The Royal Academy (RA) and in 2018 featured in the BBC Four documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist?, the culmination of a three-year research project into Black Artists and Modernism, exploring the contribution of overlooked artists of African and Asian descent to the story of Modern British art. That same year she held her first retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery. In 2021 Boyce's work featured in Between the Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now, Tate Modern and in 2022 as the first Black woman to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, she was awarded the top Golden Lion prize for her work Feeling Her Way, which combined video, collage, music and sculpture. Sonia Boyce lives and works in London, and is Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. She is represented by Simon Lee Gallery, London and her work can be found in UK public collections, including the Arts Council, Royal Academy of Arts, and Tate.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Sonia Boyce]
Publications related to [Sonia Boyce] in the Ben Uri Library