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Richard Hylton is a curator, artist and art historian, and Lecturer in Contemporary Art at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is the author of The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector - A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976-2006 (2007), and editor of Donald Rodney: Doublethink (2003)‘Donald Rodney was a fearless artist who tackled intersectional complexities of blackness, masculinity, embodiment and mortality without compromise. With this monograph, his practice now receives the in-depth attention it has long deserved.’
Kobena Mercer, author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (2016)
This expansive and emotive publication is a timely call-to-action, for all cultural practitioners to explore and begin to organise their personal collections. Hylton’s passionate and diligent archival excavation of Rodney’s short but generative artistic career has embolden and future-proofed his central position in the contemporary British art canon.
Rianna Jade Parker, Writer, Critic, Historian and Curator
Incisive, compelling, authoritative and, like Rodney’s own work, at times poignant and bittersweet. Rather than relegating Rodney to an artistic afterlife, Hylton’s essential study reconsiders his searing contribution to British art, providing a comprehensive exploration of a lifetime of dynamic artistic practice.
Indie A. Choudhury, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art (Global Black diasporas), The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK
An invaluable account of an artist often alluded to but rarely engaged with, <i>Donald Rodney</i> deftly analyzes a long-overlooked body of work, while adding complexity to our understanding of the cultural politics of modern Britain. Given the institutional and rhetorical erasures of artists such as Rodney, Hylton's study also does crucial archival work while posing serious ethical questions for art writers, collectors, and curators. Rodney's own confrontation of colonial histories, persistent state violence, and the iniquities of health care means – as this book makes clear – that his art still speaks to our present.
William Ian Bourland, Chair, Department of Art and Art History, Georgetown University, USA
With this passionately researched study of the work of the late Donald Rodney, Richard Hylton has revitalised the conversation on an important, yet often overlooked artist. This timely monograph marks a significant contribution to Black British art history.
Allison Young, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, Louisiana State University, USA
Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was one of the most gifted, perceptive, and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic is the first book-length study of a protean practice which spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, and new technologies.
Across eight meticulously researched chapters, the book examines the social and cultural events which inspired Rodney's artwork and the responses it elicited. From his formative years in the West Midlands as a leading exponent of ‘Black Art’, to a subsequent decade of unbridled visual innovation and social critique, the book ventures new detailed analyses of key works, exhibitions, artistic influences and collaborations.
Deploying recurring metaphors of the ‘diseased’, traumatised and ‘raced’ body, Rodney addressed racial and social inequality, legacies of slavery, police brutality, sport, and Black male identity in novel and powerful ways. Attending to the artist’s material dexterity and visual acuity, the book considers how and why Rodney’s innovative practice uniquely challenged delineations between the political and non-political, personal and public, representation and visibility. Over a generation has passed since Rodney’s premature death from the effects of the hereditary blood disorder sickle cell anaemia at aged thirty-six. Despite this, Rodney's work continues to speak to our contemporary moment in a multiplicity of ways. As such, the book provides a much-needed critical perspective and insight to the work and legacy of a nonpareil British artist.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Preface
Introduction
1. Posthumous Career
2. Blood Ah Goh Run, Blood Ah Goh Run
3. Burnin’ All Illusions: Slavery and its Legacies
4. Material Witness
5. The Making of Crisis
6. Skin in the Game
7. The Art of Collaboration
8. The Secret Life of Fragile Houses
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index