Born: 1954, Tanzania
Died: NA
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
In 2017, 63-year-old Tanzanian-British artist Lubaina Himid became the oldest artist to win the acclaimed Turner Prize, as well as the first woman of African descent. This was only after the administrators of the prize changed the rules to allow it to be awarded to those over 50, perhaps realizing that the age limit was discounting the future potential of countless artists like most of those in this chapter. “I knew very definitely, in the way that you don’t necessarily if you’re 45, that I had more years behind me than in front. You could think, if you won it at 45, that you might have the same amount of time again to try things, to fail, to try things again. To live fast and loose, and have big parties. And I suppose at 63 I thought: ‘Well, at the best, I’ve probably got 20 years of making,’” Himid later told The Guardian. “It is possible to change something about yourself or about your surroundings or about the world. I want people to think: “If she can do it, then it must be possible for me to do it, too.’”
The following year, she was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts and received a CBE for services to the arts, but the Turner wasn’t the turn(er)ing point in her career. That had come a few years earlier, she said, when she signed with the Hollybush Gardens gallery in London in 2013. Prior to this, she’d been working steadily and had moderate success in regional areas but hadn’t yet gained recognition with the larger, metropolitan institutions. The 2010s and 2020s saw bigger solo exhibitions, with her work being put on display internationally across Europe and in New York, as well as U.K. museums like the Tate Modern.
Himid, who works across paintings, drawings, prints, and installations, has long advocated for increased representation of women artists of color in the U.K. art world, and her own works celebrate “the contribution black people have made to cultural life in Europe for the past several hundred years.” When her Tanzanian father died shortly after her birth, Himid’s British mother brought her to the U.K. when she was four months old. Her mother, a textile designer, instilled a love of art in the child from a young age. But Himid also saw the lack of diversity that would drive her activism later in life: “I absolutely knew from an early age that African people, Black people, made art, but everywhere around was telling me that we didn’t.”
Himid went on to study theater design, which would influence her installation work. She worked extensively as a curator, seeking out other artists of color to present to the public, such at the 1985 show The Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Many of those artists would also find later success. “They were always artists of quality,” says Himid. “I think some people might say: ‘Oh, we’re showing them now because now they’ve got really good.’ Yeah, but even I who didn’t have a degree from the Courtauld could tell they were really good 30 years ago.”