CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/11/2020

A timely message in 'Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual'

"More Tax Less Music" (2014) is reproduced from Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual, the first complete monograph on the Turner-Prize-winning pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and 90s. A fitting image for 2020 New Hampshire Primary Day, this painting is from Himid's Lost Election Posters series. "The titles and texts reflect impossible choices and vaguely dystopian scenarios," Himid writes. The works "attempt to question the very notion of how we have arrived at the absurd choices we are forced to adhere to across the present political landscape of the early 21st century. The series plays with my love of textiles, patterns, old fashioned everyday household objects such as ceramics, baskets and children’s toys. As the work developed the imagined protagonist, the black politician, emerged as central to the questions posed about who represents us. These later works are essentially portraits of potential power, each named to remember a year of significant political shifts in thinking."