Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1949 New York, USA

Year of Migration to the UK: 1980

Other name/s: Rita Morrison

Biography

Artist and lecturer Rita Keegan (neé Morrison) was born in the Bronx, New York, USA in 1949 into a family of Caribbean and Black-Canadian descent. After studying Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute (1969–72) she moved to London in 1980. In the wake of the Brixton riots of 1981, in south London, Keegan played a crucial role in feminist practice and the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, establishing the Brixton Art Gallery and curating the first exhibition by The Black Women Artists collective, Mirror Reflecting Darkly, in 1982. The gallery also exhibited the work of the Lesbian & Gay Artists Group and was the first gallery in Britain to hold nationwide exhibitions that exclusively featured artists who identified as queer. In 1984, she co-founded Copy Art, which served as both a resource and educational hub for community groups and artists interested in the emerging technologies of computers, scanners, and photocopiers. From 1985–90, she worked for the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL), where she established the Women Artists of Colour Index, later called ‘Women in Colour’. Working in collaboration with the African Asian Visual Artists Archive, she compiled slides of the work of Black women artists from exhibitions and compiled folders on each individual, comprising articles and other relevant texts from periodicals, magazines, catalogue extracts, newspapers and books in the Women Artists Slide Library archives. This work resulted in a valuable historical resource, essential for contemporary discussions of race and gender. The artist declared that ‘It [didn’t] matter how fabulous the show – if you didn’t have the ephemera, it was hard to say that you existed’ (The Guardian). Her painting (1986) was included in the landmark survey exhibition Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996 at the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York in 1997, featuring, among others, the work of Sonia Boyce, Sokari Douglas Camp, Uzo Egonu and Ronald Moody. The painting's title was a reference to the backdrop colour of the artwork, while also alluding to Keegan's maternal, indigenous origins in Dominica.

Keegan’s artistic practice encompasses digital animation, collage, textiles, painting, and installation, as well as experiential media such as scent. Using her own comprehensive family archive, which comprises a photographic chronicle of a Canadian black middle-class family from the 1890s to the present day, her artwork delves into themes of memory, history and identity: ‘I’m made of many places, people, and things’, she declared (Artforum). As writer and researcher Dr Janice Cheddie noted, Keegan’s focus on family dynamics and the home, ‘reasserts the power of Black love and Black female creativity as an enduring legacy of remembrance and reparation’ (South London Gallery exhibition guide). Keegan employs her images to trace the politics of dress, decoration, and self-expression, drawing upon her personal history to produce self-portraits and conceptual clothing that produce affirmative and complex portrayals of Black female identity, beauty and experience. Her work is often the result of collaborative and communal art practices, and the ways in which they relate to identity, exemplified by her mixed-media installation Trophies Revisited (2021), which reinterpreted her artwork Cycles (1992), initially presented at the Bluecoat in Liverpool as part of the Trophies of Empire exhibition, curated by Keith Piper. Keegan described Cycles as an attempt to ‘personalise issues of the African diaspora’ (South London Gallery), collaging family photographs with historical images related to the enslavement of African people, and incorporating this material into an installation of spices such as turmeric and cumin, piles of sand, tar-stained ship's ropes, and wax print fabric created by Europeans for the African market. Keegan’s new version included a patchwork train titled Social Fabric, composed of various patches contributed by different people. This textile embodied the numerous strands of Keegan’s family connections while also calling for a greater understanding of communal art-making and social modeling. The process of creating this artwork also reflected on the power and resilience inherent in creative communities globally, as well as the sense of togetherness present in her home during the 2019–20 COVID pandemic.

During the early 1990s, Keegan held the position of Director at the African and Asian Visual Arts Archive (AAVAA). Alongside her creative and archival endeavours, she also taught New Media and Digital Diversity at Goldsmith's University of London. Keegan's exhibitions include: Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (both 1992); ICA, London (1993); InIVA and the British Museum, London (both 1995); Horniman Museum, London (2006). More recently, the South London Gallery presented Keegan’s first solo exhibition in more than 15 years, Somewhere Between, There and Here (2021), which featured, among other works, Trophies Revisited. The show was curated by the Rita Keegan Archive Project, a social history and curatorial collective that seeks to preserve, exhibit, and share her collections. Keegan’s work is not currently represented in UK public collections.