Amanda Bintu Holiday (born 1964) is a Sierra Leonean-British artist, filmmaker and poet. [1]
Amanda Holiday was born in 1964 in Sierra Leone. [1] Aged five, she emigrated to the United Kingdom, and grew up in Wigan. [2] She completed the foundation art course at Jacob Kramer College alongside Clio Barnard and Damien Hirst and went on to study fine art at Wimbledon School of Art graduating in 1987. [3]
Holiday was active in the second wave of the Black British art movement, undertaking large-scale figurative mixed-media drawings. The Hum of History, in charcoal and chalk, was "a cyclic story about hope in the 80s". Her work was exhibited in major 1980s black British art exhibitions including Creation for Liberation, Some of us are Brave, Black Art: Plotting the Course and Black Perspectives . [1]
She directed the short video Employing the Image (1989) as part of the Arts Council Black Arts Video Project featuring the work of contemporary black visual artists Sonia Boyce, Simone Alexander, Zarina Bhimji, Keith Piper and Allan deSouza. Holiday directed shorts including Umbrage funded by Arts Council/C4, Miss Queencake as part of BFI New Directors and Manao Tupapau funded by Arts Council/BBC. [1] Miss Queencake was shown at the Torino Film Festival. [4] It tells the story of a mixed-race teenager, Bira, from the North of England married off to a white boatman. Embarking on her honeymoon, Bira escapes the racism of her everyday life by constructing a fantasy world in which she is a princess. [5] Manao Tupapau looked at the experience of Merahi metua no Tehamana modelling for Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. [6]
From 2001 to 2010 Holiday lived in Cape Town, writing and directing several educational television series. [3]
In 2019, Holiday completed the Creative Writing (Poetry) course at the University of East Anglia. In 2020, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and in the same year founded Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, the UK's first crowdfunded poetry press. As of 2021, she is a research student at the School of Humanities and Social Science at Brighton University. [3]
Into the Open, subtitled "New Paintings, Prints and Sculptures by Contemporary Black Artists", was an exhibition of art by black artists displayed at various venues in the United Kingdom in 1984.
Sonia Dawn Boyce, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK.
The BLK Art Group was the name chosen in 1982 by a group of five influential conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom. Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, Eddie Chambers and Donald Rodney were initially based in the English Midlands.
Zarina Bhimji is a Ugandan Indian photographer, based in London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, exhibited at Documenta 11 in 2002, and is represented in the public collections of Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Liverpool and the Black Atlantic was a season of citywide series of exhibitions and events initiated by Tate Liverpool exploring connections between cultures and continents.
Lubaina Himid is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, feminist, cultural historian, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She began her career as a writer and poet, becoming a visual artist not long afterwards. By the end of 1985 she had shown her artwork in three exhibitions and her first collection of poetry had been published. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black people in Europe. She was a champion of the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and was fascinated by the Haitian-born French performer Jeanne Duval.
Chisenhale Gallery is a non-profit contemporary art gallery based in London's East End. The gallery occupies the ground level of a former veneer factory on Chisenhale Road, situated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, near Victoria Park and flanking the Hertford Union Canal. Housed in the same building are two other distinct initiatives: Chisenhale Studios and Chisenhale Dance Space, named also for the road on which they reside.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman is a British artist, celebrated for her radical feminist practice, which examines representation, gender and cultural identity. She works across a wide range of mediums including printmaking, drawing, painting, installation and film.
Claudette Elaine Johnson is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and her involvement with the BLK Art Group. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as "one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today".
No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 was a major public art and archives exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK, held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, over a six-month period, with a future digital touring exhibition, and an associated programme of events. No Colour Bar took its impetus from the life work and archives of Jessica Huntley and Eric Huntley, Guyanese-born campaigners, political activists and publishers, who founded the publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications and the associated Walter Rodney Bookshop.
Transmission Gallery is an artist-run space in Glasgow. It was established in 1983 by graduates of Glasgow School of Art. It primarily shows the work of young early career artists and is run by a changing voluntary committee of six people. Among the artists who have served on its committee are Douglas Gordon, Claire Barclay, Roderick Buchanan, Christine Borland, Jacqueline Donachie, Martin Boyce, Simon Starling, Lucy Skaer, Adam Benmakhlouf, Alberta Whittle, Ashanti Sharda Harris and Katherine Ka Yi Liu 廖加怡.
Five Black Women was an exhibition at the Africa Centre, London, featuring the work of British artists Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati and Veronica Ryan held in 1983. The exhibition was organised by Himid, the first of several "widely respected" exhibitions she organised featuring Black women artists.
The Other Story was an exhibition held from 29 November 1989 to 4 February 1990 at the Hayward Gallery in London. The exhibition brought together the art of "Asian, African and Caribbean artists in post war Britain", as indicated in the original title. It is celebrated as a landmark initiative for reflecting on the colonial legacy of Britain and for establishing the work of overlooked artists of African, Caribbean, and Asian ancestry. Curated by artist, writer, and editor Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story was a response to the "racism, inequality, and ignorance of other cultures" that was pervasive in the late-Thatcher Britain in the late 1980s. The legacy of the exhibition is significant in the museum field, as many of the artists are currently part of Tate's collections. The exhibition received more than 24,000 visitors and a version of the exhibition travelled to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 10 March to 22 April 1990; and Manchester City Art Gallery and Cornerhouse, 5 May to 10 June 1990.
Brenda Patricia Agard was a Black-British photographer, artist, poet and storyteller who was most active in the 1980s, when she participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black-British artists in the United Kingdom. Agard's work focused on creating "affirming images centred on the resilience of the Black woman," according to art historian Eddie Chambers.
Joseph Adekunle Olubo, was an artist and book illustrator active in the 1980s. He participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black British artists in the United Kingdom. Olubo was one of 22 artists included in the 1983 inaugural exhibition, Heart in Exile, at The Black-Art Gallery, an art space in London which worked with artists of African and Caribbean backgrounds.
Nina Edge is an English ceramicist, feminist and writer.
The Essential Black Art was an art exhibition held at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1988, curated by Rasheed Araeen. The exhibition contained the work of nine artists: Araeen, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Alan de Souza, Mona Hatoum, Gavin Jantjes and Keith Piper. It provided a foretaste of Araeem's larger exhibition of the following year, The Other Story.
Black Women Time Now was a 1983 art exhibition at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, featuring the work of fifteen artists announcing themselves as Black Women.