Alberta Whittle


Alberta Whittle is a Barbadian-Scottish multidisciplinary artist who works across media: film, sculpture, print, installation and performance. She lives and works in Glasgow. She was the winner of the Margaret Tait Award in 2018, winner of the Frieze Artist Award in 2020, received a Turner Prize bursary, also in 2020, and represented Scotland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.

Life and education

Whittle was born and grew up in Barbados, moving to Birmingham as a teenager, and later to Scotland to study. She gained an MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2011 and she is undertaking a PhD at Edinburgh College of Art. She is a research associate at the , situated at the University of Johannesburg.

Work

Alberta Whittle's work is concerned with questioning how history and society are constructed in the Western world. Her practice takes on the legacies of colonialism and slavery, and reflects upon black oppression and the way in which the racialised black body can carry markers of such oppression that may play out in an individual's mental or physical health. Her work is also concerned with environmental issues such as the climate crisis.
Whittle talks about her move to the UK from the Caribbean as something that, for her, drew attention to the inequalities in the way in which history is captured and told by different nations. She says: 'I was really quite shocked, moving to the UK, going to school in Birmingham, and living and studying in Scotland, by how there was an acute absence of conversation or acknowledgement in terms of these intricate and uneasy relationships between Europe and the Americas, or Asia, or Africa. The privilege in avoiding these histories is something I found shocking and, I guess, hurtful. That level of inattention definitely galvanises so much of my work.'

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Alberta Whittle's work is part of the following collections: