Born: 1962, United Kingdom
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.
Sonia Boyce became the first woman of African descent to represent the U.K. at the Venice Biennale in 2022, the year she turned 60. Like many other British women artists of color, she had been working professionally for decades, and was well-known as part of the Black arts movement. However, like “women’s” art, works by people of color have often been relegated to separate niches, apart from the mainstream. Although the Tate bought her work Missionary Position II when she was just 25, making her the first woman of African descent to have a painting purchased by the institution, it was almost 10 years before she was included in an exhibition at Tate Britain in 1996. In fact, Boyce would later lead the three-year Black Artists and Modernism project, which discovered 2,000 works by artists of African or Asian descent that had been purchased by 30 museums and galleries and then never displayed. Instead of being shown to the public, they were locked away in store rooms and vaults, never to be seen.
There is an ongoing debate in the art world about whether exhibitions specifically highlighting marginalized groups—such as Himid’s 1983 Five Black Women, which included Boyce—are still the best option, as opposed to incorporating such artists into shows that are not defined by those marginalized identities. The argument is that continuing to define people of color, women, and other traditionally excluded groups by those groupings is perpetuating the separation of them from the mainstream, and often bigger, more publicized, and better funded arenas. In other words, a white man’s work is just art, while a black woman’s art is a lesser, niche subset. On the other hand, there will also always be a case to be made for grouping artists based on communal lived experiences, and over time, we have seen more integration, leading to the third option: why not both?
Stories like Himid’s and Boyce’s demonstrate a not-uncommon theme: artists creating work in a time where the world they were living in wasn’t ready for them yet, and so they worked for decades to change their worlds, carving out spaces for themselves and others. Boyce recalled seeing a flyer for an exhibition of Black artists in 1981. “I was born in London, grew up in London, and went to art school from about the age of 15, but I was totally unaware until that show that there were artists of African or Asian descent working in the U.K. at all.” Thirty-five years later, Boyce became the first woman of African descent elected to the Royal Academy in 2016, and was soon joined by fellow Five Black Women artists Himid in 2018, Veronica Ryan in 2022, and Claudette Johnson in 2024. Ryan, like Himid, also won the Turner Prize following the removal of the under-50 age limit.
In addition to pushing for change in professional spaces, artists like Himid and Boyce are also guiding the future of art as teachers. “It took me a long time to get over art school,” Boyce says of her time at Stourbridge College of Technology and Art in the early ‘80s, with a curriculum centred on a male-dominated canon and abstract art, which happened to be popular at the time. “I was quite resistant to the idea that there is a particular way to make art, and that other ways of making art are somehow redundant or irrelevant, or just shabby.”
“When I came out of art school, there wasn’t a roadmap for someone like me. When I was a student, being introduced to feminist art practices was a revelation, and now it’s just not so much of an issue, because there are more of us around. The same goes for artists of diverse backgrounds,” Boyce has said. “Now, I think artists are able to set out their stall and have some understanding of what they want to achieve, which is brilliant. It’s about time, frankly.”