Tate Britain gives Sonia Boyce, the first Black woman to represent Britain at Venice and a Golden Lion winner, her first survey at the gallery.
Tate Britain in Millbank opens its first survey of Sonia Boyce, the artist who won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, on Wednesday 24 March 2027. It covers forty years of work.
Boyce was born in London in 1962 and trained at Stourbridge College of Technology and Art. She emerged in the 1980s within the British Black Arts Movement with pastel drawings and collages.
She moved on into photography, performance and the participatory, improvised work she is known for, made with other people in the room. In 2016 she became the first Black woman elected a Royal Academician since the Academy’s founding in 1768.
From 2015 to 2018 she led Black Artists and Modernism, a research project on Black British artists. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to represent Britain at Venice, with the installation Feeling Her Way. She is now Dame Sonia Boyce.
The exhibition spans installation, photography, collage, drawing, film and sculpture. It sets reimagined earlier works beside installations never shown in the UK and gives her early pastels and collages their fullest showing. Running through it is the Devotional series, the living archive she has built in conversation with the public.