Lubaina Himid

Best known for her paintings that excavate the legacy of colonialism and expand the possibilities of Black representation, Lubaina Himid (born 1954) played a pivotal role in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and became the first Black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017. Published on the occasion of Himid’s most recent solo exhibition for The Contemporary Austin’s 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Make Do and Mend provides readers with a rare behind-the-scenes look into Himid’s process for two new bodies of work: a suite of 10 Strategy Paintings depicting Black men and women seated around tables invested in problem-solving the dynamics of power, and 64 sculptural plank paintings, entitled Aunties, that formally evoke East African funerary objects and Postminimalism, as they pay tribute to the relationships between women.

This book was published in conjunction with The Contemporary Austin; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

The first full monograph on the work of UK-based painter Lubaina Himid (born 1954) reproduces her paintings and collects her writings from the 1990s to the present. Born in the British protectorate of Zanzibar (now Tanzania), Himid makes colorful, decorative paintings, as well as sculptures and ceramics, generally themed around African experience and the global history of the African diaspora, and often referencing the aesthetics of African textiles.

Himid's career has been a singularly distinguished one: she has spent most of her life in Britain and first became known in the early 1980s as a curator and artist in collaboration with the BLK Art Group, the British Afro-Carribean artists’ group influenced by the United States’ Black Arts Movement. In 2017 Himid became the first black woman to win the Turner Prize.

This superbly produced and important publication is thoroughly illustrated with 280 color images from throughout her career and documentation of more recent exhibitions and projects.

Work from Underneath marks the first solo museum show in the United States of Turner Prize–winning British artist Lubaina Himid (born 1954).

A pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and ’90s, Himid has long championed invisible and marginalized histories, and throughout the last three decades, Himid’s works in drawing, painting, sculpture and textile have critiqued the consequences of colonialism and questioned the invisibility of people of color in art as well as in the media.

Catalog contributors include art historian Jessica Bell Brown, poet and theorist Fred Moten, and an interview with the artist by New Museum Associate Curator, Natalie Bell.

Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists’ practices and continues the New Museum’s history of giving contemporary artists their first museum presentations in New York.