Sonja turner artist biography

This article was first published by The Guardian.

The first black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale reflects on a career challenging the racial and sexual bias behind what art hangs in galleries – and around in our memories.

Who gets to decide what goes on the walls of our museums? That quiet but revolutionary question has nagged at Sonia Boyce ever since she first visited London galleries in her teens. Her 40-year inquiry into it, as an artist and academic, culminated in outraged tabloid headlines in 2018 when, as part of an exhibition of her work at Manchester Art Gallery, she temporarily removed a painting from the gallery’s “permanent” collection – JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs – and replaced it with an empty space in which visitors could leave Post-it notes recording their thoughts about the depiction of women in the gallery.

For some male commentators, this was a blood-pressure elevating act of cancel-culture vandalism on a level with toppling statues of slave traders into the drink. Boyce had a point, though. While only 8.5% of the pain

 

 

Biography

2019 -

Work on the series The Other Day

2013 - 2018

Work on the series An Abundance of Caution

2009 - 2012

Work on the series The Passage

2004 - 2010

Work on the series The Quiet of Dissolution

2001 - 2003

Travels in Argentina, Chile and Switzerland, photographing for the series Forces, work on building and photographing models for Forces

1999/ 2000

Travels in North America, Iceland, England and Switzerland for the

series you are here (DG Bank Art Grant)

1998

Stay in Australia, Work on the project you are here

1997

Graduation at the Fachhochschule Dortmund,

Degree Diplom Visual Communication, Photography and Film

Work on the project No Sense of Place in New York,

(German Academic Exchange Service Grant)

1995/ 1996

Study at the School of Visual Arts, New York, Major Photography

(Fulbright Grant)

1993

Travels in Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica,

work on the series GAP

1991

Begin of the study at the Fachhochschule Dortmund, Germany

Major Visual Communication, Photography and Film

1989 - 1991

St

Sonia Gomes

Afro-Brazilian contemporary artist

Sonia Gomes (Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais,1948) is a Brazilian contemporary artist who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.[1] Gomes frequently employs found objects and textiles in her works, twisting, stretching, and bundling them to fashion wiry or knotty sculptural forms.[2]

Background

Sonia Gomes was born in 1948 to a Black mother and white father in Caetanópolis, a small town in Minas Gerais considered to be the birthplace of Brazil's textile industry.[3][4] As a child, she showed an interest in deconstructing her clothes and creating her own jewelry from leftover fabric and found materials.[5] Despite this early inclination towards artistic creation, Gomes initially pursued a career in law. In 1994, at the age of 45, Gomes left her legal career to attend the Guignard School of Art in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. This pivotal decision marked her formal entry into the art world.[3][6][5]

She credits her maternal grandmother with her i

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