Sonia Boyce gained prominence in the 1980s during the Black Arts Movement and is currently Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Her work incorporates a variety of media such as photographs, performance, films, prints, drawings, installation and sound. Her most recent work incorporates the audience as an integral part of the artwork demonstrating how cultural differences might be articulated, mediated and interacted.
Boyce began Devotional in 1999, a long-term project that has been exhibited in different ways over the last two decades. It first emerged from a collaboration with the collective Liverpool Black Sisters. Starting the Devotional series with a print of Dame Shirley Bassey (b. Wales 1937), the women in the group created a map of women of colour in the British music industry. This iteration of Devotional is a room-scale installation, which includes the names of 200 musicians printed on wallpaper, displayed with a series of 100 magazine covers and articles on placards from a wider archive held by Boyce. Boyce built this archive through public contributions to celebrate female singers in British entertainment and to be representative of a collective memory that the public can have access to.
Boyce now wishes to close the Devotional series, with the final version finding its home at MIMA. Boyce has a long-standing relationship with the museum, which first acquired her work in 1987. Since 2018, curators at MIMA have worked with Boyce through the research project Black Artists & Modernism, based at UAL. The installation connects with MIMA’s commitment to discussing overlooked cultural narratives and offers rich stimulus for discussing relationships, visibility, memories and creativity with the wider community in Middlesbrough.
