Keith Piper was born in 1960 in Malta - a British colony at the time - to parents of African-Caribbean heritage who had moved to England in the 1950s, and was raised in and around Birmingham, going on to study at the Trent Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. His creative practice exists in response to specific issues, historical relationships and geographical sites, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. Piper was a founder member of the Blk Art Group in the early 1980s, with his work over the past 30 years ranging from painting, through photography and installation to a use of digital media, video and computer based interactivity.
Artist and curator Keith Piper was born in 1960 in Mtarfa, Malta - a British colony at the time - to parents of African-Caribbean heritage who had moved to England in the 1950s, and was raised in and around Birmingham. He was first attracted to art as a response to the industrialised, decaying landscape of his youth. He went on to study Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic before graduating with a master's degree in Environmental Media from the Royal College of Art. Although Piper's early and student work was largely painting, collage and print based, from the late 1980s he became primarily associated with technically innovative work that explored multi-media elements such as computer software, websites, tape/slide, sound and video within an installation-based practice. His creative practice exists in response to specific issues, historical relationships and geographical sites, and he has exhibited national and internationally. Piper was a founding member of the Blk Art Group in Wolverhampton in 1979, a collective of young black artists inspired by the black arts movement, who raised questions about what constituted black art, how to define its identity and what it could become in the future. During this period, he established a research driven approach prioritising thematic exploration over an attachment to any particular media.
In the large canvas (You Are Now Entering) Mau Mau Country (1983, Arts Council Collection) Piper explored the legacy of colonialism and the fear of entering into ‘unknown’ lands. It depicted martyred but powerful and defiant savage maroon warriors (one with his lips stitched together with thread), surrounded by slogans such as `No Barclaycards here` and `No little white lies` and the anti-colonial `We are all pagans`. Included in 1983 in the exhibition Into the Open, held at the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield it was purchased by the Arts Council Collection the following year, making it one of the first works by the new generation of Black artists to enter a major public collection. In Go West Young Man (1987, Tate Gallery) Piper incorporated photographs with printed and handwritten text. The artwork, comprising 14 panels, combined materials relating to the slave trade, such as the iconic 1778 graphic of the English slave ship Brookes, with stills from films, pictures of lynchings and black male bodybuilders. In 2011, Piper co-founded with former Blk Art Group’ members Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith the BLK Art Group Research Project, with the aim of promoting debate, enquiry, scholarship and understanding of the British Black Art Movement of the 1980s. In 2017, INIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), in partnership with Liverpool's creative hub Bluecoat, presented a solo exhibition of Piper's work. Entitled Unearthing the Bankers Bones, it featured large-scale painting, installation and digital works that address anxieties about the impacts of globalisation. Lending its title to the exhibition, the centrepiece of the show was a 70th Anniversary Commission for the Arts Council Collection with Iniva and Bluecoat, consisting of three synchronised high definition video projections, which depict a narrative of economic and social collapse. This was Piper’s first monographic show since the retrospective Relocating the Remains, produced by Iniva and held at the Royal College of Art in 1997. Piper's work can be seen in numerous public collections across the UK, including Tate; Graves Gallery, Sheffield and Cartwright Hall, Bradford. In September 2023 Piper featured in the longstanding BBC Radio 4 programme 'The Reunion', exploring the foundation of the BLK Art Group.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Keith Piper]
Publications related to [Keith Piper] in the Ben Uri Library