Sonia Boyce


Dame Sonia Dawn Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator who lives and works in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice in several art colleges across the UK.
In March 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, becoming the first black female Royal Academician since the academy's founding in 1768.
In February 2020, Boyce was selected by the British Council to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2022, the first black woman to do so. In April 2022, Boyce won the Venice Biennale's top Golden Lion prize with her work Feeling Her Way.

Early life and education

Born in Islington, London, in 1962, Boyce attended Eastlea Comprehensive School in Canning Town, East London, from 1973 to 1979. From 1979 to 1980, she completed a Foundation Course in Art & Design at East Ham College of Art and Technology, going on to earn a BA degree in Fine Art at Stourbridge College from 1980 to 1983 in the West Midlands.

Career

Boyce works with a range of media including photography, installation and text. She gained prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980s. Her work also references feminism. Roy Exley has written: "The effect of her work has been to re-orientate and re-negotiate the position of Black or Afro-Caribbean art within the cultural mainstream."
Boyce has said that she is influenced by the work of Sophie Calle, Adrian Piper, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Lygia Clark, David Medalla, Art & Language, Stephen Willats, Susan Hiller and Suzanne Lacey.
An early exhibition in which Boyce participated was in 1983 at the Africa Centre, London, entitled Five Black Women. Her early works were large chalk-and-pastel drawings depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. Drawing from her background she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean. Through this work, the artist examined her position as a Black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience was rooted. She also took part in the 1983 exhibition Black Women Time Now.
In 1989, Boyce was one of four female artists selected for an exhibition called The Other Story, which was the first display of British African, Caribbean, and Asian Modernism.
In her later works, Boyce has used diverse media including digital photography to produce composite images depicting contemporary Black life. Although her focus is seen to have shifted away from specific ethnic experiences, her themes continue to be the experiences of a Black woman living in a white society, and how religion, politics and sexual politics made up that experience. She describes her later work as having "become progressively less didactic. I’m preoccupied with investigating how the artwork can have a life of its own that transcends the need to tell people what to think."
In 2018, as part of a retrospective exhibition of her art at Manchester Art Gallery, Boyce was invited by the curators of the gallery to make new work in dialogue with the collection's 18th- and 19th-century galleries, for which Boyce invited performance artists to engage with these works in these galleries in "a non-binary way". As part of one of these events, the artists decided to temporarily remove J. W. Waterhouse's painting Hylas and the Nymphs from the gallery wall, prompting a wide discussion of issues of censorship and curatorial decision-making, interpretation and judgement, by gallery audiences and in the media.
Boyce has taught widely and uses workshops as part of her creative process, and her works can be seen in many national collections. Boyce's works are held in the collections of Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, British Council and the Arts Council Collection at the Southbank Centre.
In 2018, she was the subject of the BBC Four documentary film Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain's Hidden Art History, in which Brenda Emmanus followed Boyce as she travelled the UK, highlighting the history of Black artists and modernism. Boyce led a team in preparing an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery that focused on artists of African and Asian descent who have played a part in shaping the history of British art.
In February 2020 Boyce was selected as the first Black woman to represent the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale; chosen by the British Council, she would produce a major solo exhibition. The British Council's director of visual arts, Emma Dexter, stated that Boyce's inclusive and powerful work would be a perfect selection for this significant time in UK history. Boyce first attended the Biennale in 2015, she was a part of curator Okwui Enwezor's "All the World's Features" exhibition. Her piece, Feeling Her Way, was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2022 exhibition.
Boyce produced Newham Trackside Wall a frieze comprising documentary photography of the buildings and streets of three neighbourhoods in Newham, a floral pattern inspired by the plants and wildlife in the local area and elements of over 300 testimonies that were collected by Boyce from 2017 to 2018. As part of the project, young people were trained in oral history to help Boyce collect these testimonies, a pub quiz was held as a way to prompt stories to be told and people could also contribute stories online.

Honours

Boyce was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 Birthday Honours, Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 New Year Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2024 New Year Honours, all for services to art.
On 9 March 2016, Boyce was elected as a member of the Royal Academy.
In 2024 Boyce was elected to the British Academy in London, as an Honorary Fellow.

Art market

Boyce is represented by Hauser & Wirth and APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia, Italy.

Personal life

Boyce's partner is curator David A. Bailey, with whom she has two daughters.
In February 2023, Boyce appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

Medium

In her early artistic years, Boyce used chalk and pastel to make drawings of her friends, family and herself. She graduated later to incorporate photography, graphic design, film, and caricature to convey very political messages within her work. The incorporation of collage allowed her to explore more complex pieces. It is important to note Boyce's utilization of caricature within her work. The caricature is historically meant to showcase exaggerated features of individuals. They are often grotesque and can incite negative perceptions of their subjects. By using caricatures, Boyce allows herself to reclaim them in her own image.

Message

"Boyce's work is politically affiliated. She utilizes a variety of mediums within the same work to convey messages revolving around Black representation, perceptions of the black body and pervasive notions that arose from scientific racism. Within her bodies of work, Boyce works to convey the personal isolation that results from being black in a white society. In her work she explores notions of the Black Body as the "other". Commonly, she uses collage to convey a body of art that incites a complicated history. Boyce rose as a prominent artist in the 1980s when the Black Cultural Renaissance took place. The movement arose out of opposition to Margaret Thatcher's brand of conservatism and her cabinet's policies. Using this societal backdrop, Boyce takes conventional narratives surrounding the black body and turns it upside down. Through her art she conveys a hope to overturn ethnographic notions of race that pervaded throughout slavery and after the slaves had been emancipated."

Exhibitions

Solo

Conversations, The Black-Art Gallery, London Sonia Boyce, Air Gallery, London Sonia Boyce: recent work, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Something Else, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London Do You Want To Touch?, 181 Gallery, London Sonia Boyce: PEEP, Royal Pavilion Art Gallery, Brighton Recent Sonia Boyce: La, La, La, Reed College, Portland, Oregon Devotional, National Portrait Gallery, London For you, only you Crop Over, Harewood House, Leeds, and Barbados Museum & Historical Society Like Love – Part One, Spike Island, Bristol, and tour ;Sonia Boyce#cite note-20| "Part 2 and Part 3" Scat – Sound and Collaboration, Iniva, Rivington Place, London Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre , Villa Arson, Nice

Group

Five Black Women, Africa Centre, London Black Woman Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre, London Strip Language, Gimpel Fils, London Into The Open, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield Heroes And Heroines, The Black-Art Gallery, London Room At The Top, Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London Blackskins/Bluecoat, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool Celebrations/Demonstrations, St Matthews Meeting Place, London No More Little White Lies, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff Reflections, Riverside Studios, London The Thin Black Line, ICA, London From Generation To Generation, Black Art Gallery, London Some Of Us Are Brave – All Of Us Are Strong, Black Art Gallery London Unrecorded Truths, Elbow Room, London From Two Worlds, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London Caribbean Expressions In Britain, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery Basel Art Fair, Switzerland State Of The Art, ICA, London A Cabinet Of Drawings, Gimpel Fils, London The Image Employed – The Use Of Narrative In Black Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester Critical Realism, Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery Basel Art Fair, Switzerland Royal Overseas League, London The Essential Black Art, Chisenhale Gallery, London The Impossible Self, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg The Thatcher Years, Angela Flowers Gallery, London Fashioning Feminine Identities, University of Essex, Colchester Along The Lines of Resistance, Cooper Art Gallery, Barnsley The Wedding, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield The Other Story, Hayward Gallery, London The Cuban Biennale, Wifredo Lam Cultural Centre, Havana The British Art Show, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow Distinguishing Marks, University of London The Invisible City, Photographers Gallery, London Black Markets, Cornerhouse, Manchester Delfina Open Studios, London Shocks To The System, Southbank Centre, London Delfina Annual Summer Show, London An English Summer, Palazzo della Crepadona, Belluna, Italy Photo Video, Photographers' Gallery, London Delfina Annual Summer Show, London White Noise, IKON Gallery, Birmingham Northern Adventures, Camden Arts Centre and St Pancras Station, London Nosepaint Artist Club, London Innocence And Experience, Manchester City Art Galleries New England Purpose Built: Long Distance Information, Real Art Ways, Hartford, USA Thinking Aloud, Small Mansions Art Centre, London Wish You Were Here, BANK, London Glass Vitrine, INIVA Launch, London Free Stories, LA Galerie, Frankfurt Portable Fabric Shelters, London Printworks Trust, London Fetishism, Brighton Museum, Brighton Mirage, ICA, London Photogenetic, Street Level, Glasgow Cottage Industry, Beaconsfield, London Picturing Blackness in British Art, Tate, London Kiss This, Focalpoint Gallery, Southend Video Positive: the Other Side of Zero, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool New Woman Narratives, World-Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London Sharjah International Biennial: 7, Sharjah Menschen und Orte, Kunstverein Konstanz, Konstanz Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty, Thessaloniki Biennal 2, Greece Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool and tour Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Griot Girlz: Feminist Art and the Black Atlantic, Kunstlerhaus Büchenhausen, Innsbruck ¡Afuera! Art in Public Spaces, Centro Cultural España/Cordoba, Argentina 8+8 Contemporary International Video Art, 53 Museum, Guangzhou The Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art Coming Ashore, Berardo Collection Museum/P-28 Container Project, Lisbon Black Sound White Cube, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin Migrations: Journeys into British Art, Tate Britain There is no archive in which nothing gets lost, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Play! Re-capturing the Radical Imagination, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 7 Keywords, Rivington Place, London Speaking in Tongues, CCA, Glasgow All the World's Futures, 56th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, Guildhall Art Gallery, London

Selected awards and recognition

Research positions

  • 1996–2002: Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of East London
  • 1996–2002: Co-Director, AAVAA
  • 2004–2005: Artist Fellow, NESTA
  • 2008–2011: Research Fellow, Wimbledon College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. AHRC funded research project on the ephemeral nature of collaborative practice in art, concluding in the project The Future is Social.
  • 2015–2018: Principal Investigator, Black Artists and Modernism a research project on work by Black British artists and modernism

Selected publications

  • Gilane Tawadros, Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues, London: Kala Press, 1997.Annotations 2/Sonia Boyce: Performance
  • In 2007, Boyce, David A. Bailey and Ian Baucom jointly received the History of British Art Book Prize for the edited volume Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva and AAVAA.
  • Allison Thompson, "Sonia Boyce and Crop Over", Small Axe, Volume 13, Number 2, 2009.
  • Like Love, Spike Island, Bristol, and tour
  • Boyce co-edited the summer 2021 issue of Art History on Black British Modernism with Dorothy Price.
  • John Roberts, "Interview with Sonia Boyce",, no. 1, 55–64
  • Sonia Boyce, "Talking in Tongues", in Storms of the Heart, edited by Kwesi Owusu
  • Facsimile of letter by Sonia Boyce in Veronica Ryan's: ''Compartments/Apart-ments''