Throughout the past four decades, British artist Lubaina Himid has leaned into big questions. How can the African diaspora become more visible to the world? What are the ongoing effects of colonialism, of slavery? What can be done about hunger, incarceration, war?
For such loaded topics, Himid’s work is often filled with humor, her folksy figuration executed in bright, saturated colors. Her paintings and installations have a way of beckoning the viewer closer. “You’re invited into the conversation,” Himid, 70, tells me.
A leading figure in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and ’90s, Himid has exhibited widely and received many prestigious accolades, including the Turner Prize in 2017 and a CBE appointment in 2018. Most recently, she was awarded the Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which led to “Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend,” now on view at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. (The show was co-organized by The Contemporary Austin, where it debuted earlier this year.)
“Make Do and Mend” consists of two new bodies of work: a suite of what she calls her Strategy Paintings, and a sculptural series of 64 colorful, anthropomorphized planks titled Aunties. The latter are installed along the walls of FLAG, framed by the city’s gleaming architecture and piercing natural light.
“When I was young, my life was surrounded by women who came in and out of the house, whether my actual aunties, or friends of my mother’s,” says Himid, who moved from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) to London with her mother, a textile designer, when Himid was just a few months old. “They’re the sort of women that have opinions about what you’re wearing, opinions about who you’re going out with, what you should do with the rest of your life.”
As she’s gotten older, Himid has lost a lot of those childhood aunties—and increasingly finds herself inhabiting the role. “Now I attempt to make meaningful contributions in other people’s lives,” she says. This reflection led her to create a bigger version of her previous wooden plank installations, Drowned Orchard: Secret Boatyard, a 2014 work comprising 16 planks, and Old Boat / New Money from 2019, consisting of 32.
Each of her 64 Aunties has a distinct personality: “My team and I gathered wood from every place that we had—the garages, the cellars, the studios, the workshops,” Himid says. Once the planks were assembled from their salvaged parts, Himid went about painting them and affixing bits of ribbon, cloth, text, or even toys. (At least one unfurled badminton birdie caught my eye.)
“Everybody I talked to about the project, you could see them wishing their auntie onto the piece, and it was quite extraordinary,” she says. It’s an ode to caretaking, in all its varied forms.
Himid’s Strategy Paintings find groups of Black men and women trying to solve, or at least discuss, the world’s problems using everyday objects as metaphors. “I’m painting the moment in between a question and an answer,” says Himid. “But of course, when people are trying to work out enormous problems, they often have enormous problems between themselves.”
In Flora Botanica, three women seated in front of various bits of plant life are “trying to work out what care is,” Himid explains. How can we improve what care is, from the big systems to the small, interpersonal ways we show care for one another?
Himid takes on another worldly concern in A True and Perfect Plot. “They are interested in how we feed ourselves, how we keep the planet alive,” says Himid. Though the three figures are seated in front of a diorama of forest and farmland, the view outside their window is of lakes and mountains. The people making the decisions are at a privileged remove, divorced from the problem’s realities.
“I try to make work that is about an awkwardness and an unresolvedness,” the artist says. Something is always a little askew. It might be an incongruous pairing (the metal teapot and dainty glass in Divided Loyalties), a not-quite-right angle, a bit of patchy paint. And the symbols she employs can be unexpected. In Bitter Battles, 11 lemons stand in for monuments: What are they for? Whom do they valorize? “I got these people to use lemons to work out this problem, because the thing about a lemon is it can be many things. You can put a slice of lemon in a lovely drink, or you can squeeze lemon over fish, or it can sweeten certain things when you cook, or it can make something very tart and sharp and bitter.” She paints the pieces of fruit loose, in cages, on plinths.
It’s clear Himid has thought deeply about each problem she presents in these Strategy Paintings. “There s always this attempt to engage with everybody at that table as an equal. And you have to listen, because sometimes that’s the only way you can do it.”
Having initially trained in theater design, Himid has long been interested in the politics of performance. After receiving her BA from the Wimbledon College of Art, she got her master’s in cultural history from the Royal College of Art in London in 1984. As part of the British Black Arts Movement, she championed other artists of color as both a teacher and curator.
Her breakout 2004 piece Naming the Money comprises 100 life-size wooden cutouts of slave-servants who were “gifted” from the king of Spain to the king of France. This piece, Himid once told T magazine, changed her trajectory: “It helped me understand the power in my own ability to decide to make something that seems virtually impossible.”
“Making art is about making decisions,” she says. One brushstroke at a time, she has decided to keep going, to keep making art that explores the virtually impossible—be it solving global challenges or embodying the complexity of the auntie figure with bits of salvaged wood. Her work has a quiet force to it, the kind that spurs not only contemplation, but optimism. Maybe the answers to our questions are there for us, her art suggests, if we just listen.
“Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend” is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation through February 8, 2025.