DONALD LOCKE: Paintings and Mixed Media Sculpture

Press Release

DONALD LOCKE

Curator: Carl Hazlewood

May 8th – June 12th, 2004

Press Release

An exhibitionwork by Guyana-born artist, Donald Locke will be at Skoto Gallery, New York, May 8th – June 12th, 2004. The show will include examples of the artist’s mixed media sculpture and paintings as well as new work on paper. A reception for the artist is on Saturday, May 15th, 5-8pm.

Donald Locke was born 1930, in Stewartville, Guyana, South America and currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been active on the international scene since the early 1970s. A British Council Scholarship took him to England where he studied at Bath Academy of Art. In 1964, he graduated with honors from Edinburgh University, Scotland with a Masters Degree. After going home to Guyana to work and teach for some time, he returned to Europe where he lived and practised his art until he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979. Locke has the recipient of several other prestigious awards and he represented Guyana at the 12th Sao Paolo Biennial in 1979.

In an April 25th, 2004 review of Bending the Grid: Modernity, Identity and The Vernacular in the Work of Donald Locke, the artist’s current major solo exhibition at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ, Dan Bishoff, critic for The Star Ledger enthuses:

If there were a prize for the most stirring post-colonial art, Donald Locke might be the winner. Here is a mind and hand educated at British imperial expense, who takes the native shapes of his home country’s ancient art and creates a new pride of place for a people attempting to make their own destiny. And he doesn’t just do it once, he’s done it throughout his entire career. Besides it’s visual power and it’s politico-historical significance, the show is also a meditation on the flow of aesthetic influence – and the larger claims of Modernism to subsume or complete the ambitions of all other art stories.

Donald Locke has been on a restless intellectual and artistic quest ever since the late 1940s when he began to study art in his native Guyana. His persistent search is to establish for himself, personal and artistic values that would provide a compelling and authentic mode of visual expression. Locke is an artist who has an intuitive understanding of how culture functions. He has mastered all the formal tenets of European art history and tradition… yet, he has managed to fashion an individual space and inclusive visual experience from the vantage point of his own identity and personal experience.

Artist Statement

For many years I was greatly concerned that the sculptures, paintings and ceramics I made seemed to emerge out of differing, even opposing stylistic concerns. Every new engagement with the media , for example ventures into precisionism, chromatic austerity, tachist drawing technoques or content-specific narratives seemed to produce works that had no connection whatever with each other. I saw this as a kind instability and it bothered me greaatly. It ran counter to the widely held view, which I myself believed in , that the work of an artist had little significance if it did not also exhibit a certain unification of style, medium and subject-matter.

Some time after arriving in Atlanta, I began to produce work that was significantly different from anything I had done before, it began to dawn on me that, far from been free and rootless, there had been all along, a clear but unconsciously driven agenda behind the stylistic diversions which appeared on the surface. In retrospect, it appears that the work has always been trying to encompass and bend to the will of the imagination, every aspect of the life and experience of Black people in the New World – the landscapes they inhabit, their physical uniqueness, the folk-lore and myths which crowd their imagination, and the socio-economic legacies they inherited from the past.

Perhaps unique in the history of mankind, the Black man in the New World has been coerced in a harrowing agenda, the crossing of thousands of miles of cultural time in space of a few short generations. He has moved from captive African to slave, to free citizen of the New World, precariously clothed in a hybrid ethnicity, a “creole culture” which, because of its dominant Negro-African component, is part of the New World’s unique contribution to the civilization of modern man.

This modest selection of works from the past fifteen years, should be seen against this conceptual background, that of the “Creole” American (as distinguished from the ‘Latin America’) which it shares with an increasing number of artists here in the USA, in Britain and in the Caribbean.

Donald Locke
Atalnta, April 2004

As a special tribute to my teacher William Scott with whom I studied at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham Court from 1954 to 1957, I am including two drawings, entitlted HOMMAGE TO WILLIAM SCOTT. He was a very good teacher and later became a kind and generous “mentor” to me. Certain tendencies in my paintings can still be traced to his teaching. I have always believed that his enthusiastic recommendation of my work in 1978 was mainly responsible in my being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year, thus enabling me to come to the United States. An exhibition of work from the William Scott family collection is currently on at DENISE BIBRO Fine Art, on the fourth floor of this building