Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born to Ghanaian immigrant parents in London, England in 1977. She studied at Falmouth College of Arts (2000) and the Royal Academy Schools, London (2003). Renowned for her large portraits of Black subjects, Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the 2013 Turner Prize and has held major solo exhibitions in and outside the UK.
Artist, painter, and lecturer, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye was born to Ghanaian parents in London, England in 1977. Her parents both worked as nurses for the National Health Service after immigrating from Ghana in the 1960s. Yiadom-Boakye studied art as an undergraduate at London's Central St Martins, but she did not enjoy her time there, and so left the captial for Cornwall to attend Falmouth College of Art where she enjoyed her time much more and where she was awarded her BA in 2000. With the promise that Falmouth would photograph her work for free if she applied for an MA, Yiadom-Boakye applied to the Royal Academy Schools, London and completed her studies there in 2003 (Cooke, 2015).
Manet, Degas, and Sickert are some of the artists who influenced Yiadom-Boakye’s work from the early stages of her career, though in her portrait studies of fictionalised Black subjects she has notably created a unique style and practice. Yiadom-Boakye has claimed that ‘People are tempted to politicise the fact that I paint Black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work’ (Sinclair, 2020). Producing work on large-scale canvases, Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits depict ‘ideas’ as much as individuals, and provoke ‘the embodiment of an idea, concept or theme’, with works given enigmatic titles such as The Signifying Donkey’s Feat (2003), Politics (2005), and The Generosity (2010). A year after her MA, Yiadom-Boakye was a featured artist in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries show held as part of the Liverpool Biennial at The Coach Shed, Liverpool, and her work was also shown at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. In 2006, she was awarded an Arts Foundation Fellowship for Painting, after which she held several solo shows in London, such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Gasworks (2007) and Notes and Letters at commercial gallery, Corvi-Mora (2011).
Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013, her nomination considered a reflection of ‘an explosion of interest in her work’ (Wright, 2013). As art historian Eddie Chambers noted, the shortlisting ‘was perhaps not a particular surprise’ (Chambers, 2014). Yiadom-Boakye had been gaining significant attention in the UK press, particularly after her 2010 exhibition Any Number of Preoccupations, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Studio Museum Harlem, a leading New York gallery space that had previously shown other Black British artists such as Yinka Shonibare and Chris Ofili. Likening her work to that of Steve McQueen and his way of challenging the ‘debilitating and constraining pathology’ of the ‘Black image’, Chambers points out that for ‘a Black artist to be able to paint Black people and to draw positive attention from the art world is rare indeed’ (Chambers, 2014). Yiadom-Boakye’s Turner Prize nomination was followed by two major solo exhibitions in London in 2015: Verses After Dusk at the Serpentine Gallery and Natures, Natural and Unnatural at the Whitechapel Gallery. She was also a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize 2014. In 2017, the main staircase of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was dedicated to oil paintings by Yiadom-Boakye, displaying Here and Thereafter (2010) and Firecrest (2013). The same year, she was named as one of Apollo magazine’s ’40 Under 40 Global Artists’, and in 2019 as one of the famous names in the Powerlist’s 2020 list of 100 people with African, African-Caribbean, and African-American heritage who are considered influential (BBC, 2019). In 2020, Yiadom-Boakye held another major solo exhibition Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain, London, uniquely brought back for a second showing in 2022–23 due to interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In a four-star Guardian review, Jonathan Jones noted that her portraits make us ‘believe in someone who does not exist’, and that in committing to oil on canvas as her chosen medium, ‘She has turned Tate Britain on its head’: ‘It’s like you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in the 18th-century galleries’, Jones wrote, ‘Except the black people who only play servile, secondary roles in those portraits now occupy the foreground and the high spiritual plane once reserved for white faces in art’ (Jones, 2020).
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye lives and works in London. She is visiting lecturer at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Her works are held in many UK public collections, including the Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection, V&A, and Tate.