‘He wanted to have a wing of the Tate named after him’: remembering the groundbreaking art of Donald Rodney | Art

For many reasons, 1981 stands as a landmark year in Black British history. That January, the New Cross Fire claimed the lives of 13 young Black people. Amid widespread suspicion that the fire had been a targeted attack by violent racists, the police concluded otherwise after a lacklustre investigation. In April came the Brixton uprising, which resulted in 279 injuries to police and £7.5m worth of damage to the area’s buildings and vehicles. While the subsequent Scarman Report acknowledged some of the hardships facing people of colour, it emphatically denied the existence of institutional racism in Britain – no surprise perhaps given Thatcher had swept to victory a couple of years previously on the back of a wave of anti-immigration sentiment.

It was against this tumultuous backdrop that Donald Rodney – born to Jamaican parents and raised in Smethwick, West Midlands (a hotbed of racial tensions in the 1960s)– entered art school at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham. “When I joined in 1980 there were no other Black students but the year after there were three or four including Donald,” says Rodney’s friend and collaborator Keith Piper. Piper, himself a young Black artist who had already begun exhibiting politically charged work, swiftly formed an alliance with Rodney. “In a sense, he was the most unlikely to pick up those ideas and run with them because he was so flamboyant,” says Piper. “He was every inch the artist – very humorous but incredibly sophisticated in his connection to contemporary art.” Looking back, Piper says it was striking how early Rodney was proselytising the genius of Basquiat and he was fascinated with how his neo-expressionist techniques might be used to make more explicitly political art.

Soon, the pair’s Nottingham flat became a wellspring of ideas for the recently formed Blk Art Group, which also featured contemporaries Eddie Chambers, Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson. “At the time there was a lot of resistance to art being overtly political but it was an amazing time …[in] the early years of the Thatcher government, you had the miner’s strike, the struggle against apartheid, Greenham Common. It was a very political moment.”

The art world’s initial focus was on the group’s groundbreaking and often confrontational depictions of institutional racism. This was evident in works such as How the West Was Won (1982), which Rodney completed as an undergraduate student. The painting takes inspiration from 1950s and 60s western movies and prominently features text (“The only good injun, is a dead injun”). The work is emblematic of how the influence of pop culture formed a core of their unashamedly political approach.

Another of Rodney’s hallmarks was his reimagining of Black iconography to draw attention to racist hypocrisies and half-truths. His installation Visceral Canker (1990) exemplified this approach: two wooden plaques displaying heraldic images, connected by medical tubes pumping theatrical blood, examining how Britain’s colonial history continues to structure modern life. Similarly, Doublethink (1992), a display of 70 sporting trophies engraved with racist statements collected from media and overheard conversations (“Black sportsmen have small IQs. Black people are inadequate and bitter”), commented on society’s contradictory attitudes toward Black excellence.

But as well as commenting on racism (the institutional and the everyday) the Blk Art Group was notable for their atypically vulnerable explorations of Black identity and innovative use of multimedia. For Rodney, this often meant taking inspiration from his own struggles with illness, notably by using X-ray film sheets to document his lifelong battle with sickle cell anaemia – Rodney would die of the disease in 1998 aged 36. His experiments using medical equipment began in the late 1980s, with a lot of his work from the period being completed between hospital stays.

The artist’s upcoming retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery encompasses most of his surviving works from 1982 to 1997, from large-scale oil pastels to animatronic sculptures and even his sketchbooks. The gallery’s director, Gilane Tawadros, was a friend of Rodney’s, even writing his obituary in the Guardian. “Materiality was really important to him,” she says. “He had a sense of artworks as objects that aren’t necessarily made to live for ever but as having a precarity and vulnerability which goes against the commodification of artwork.”

For Tawadros, Rodney’s technical prowess and choice of materials are as essential to his work as the political messages which often literally adorn his creations. “Too frequently artists’ work is perceived through their biography rather than the complexities and nuances of their practice,” she says. “His work touches so many themes and issues that are acutely relevant today – it’s not reducible to the experience of young Black men in the UK at a certain moment in time.”

His exploration of the intersection of personal suffering and racial discrimination arguably reached its zenith in his most famous work, In the House of My Father (1996-97). The piece features a photograph of Rodney’s palm holding a miniature house crafted from pieces of his own skin, held together with tiny dressmakers’ pins. The work powerfully evokes themes of vulnerability, protection and the fragility of the body and the home.

Rodney’s use of his body as both medium and subject has particularly resonated with subsequent generations of creatives, notably the Black YBAs – Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Steve McQueen – but also novelists such as Caleb Azumah Nelson. In the House of My Father is directly referenced in Nelson’s acclaimed debut, Open Water, as the protagonist, a young Black photographer, reflects on vulnerability and the weight of his own trauma.

Despite frequent hospitalisations, Rodney’s ambitions never abated. “He became increasingly reliant on a group of artists and curators around him who became known as Donald Rodney plc, who would help him to realise these increasingly ambitious projects,” says Piper. Perhaps his most significant collaborator during his later years was Prof Mike Phillips, a robotics researcher who had studied at Carnegie Mellon University and was working at the cutting edge of machine learning technologies. Autoicon (1997-2000), a posthumously completed work, merged art with artificial intelligence through a Java-based AI and neural network that simulated his physical presence and creative personality. The platform engaged users in text-based conversations, drawing from a vast archive of Rodney’s documentation, medical records, interviews, images, notes and videos.

His twin fascinations with race and robotics greatly informed much of his final exhibition, Nine Night in El Dorado, which opened at South London Gallery in September 1997. Dedicated to his late father, the show was named for the Caribbean tradition of celebrating the life of a recently deceased family member for many days after their passing. The exhibition featured Camouflage (1997), a work that subtly stitched racist slurs into camouflage fabric, making them barely legible, but attention on opening night was largely stolen by Psalms (1997), an automated wheelchair that weaved its way around the gallery. Tragically, Rodney was too ill to attend the exhibition but Tawadros recalls “this unoccupied wheelchair was like a haunting presence of Donald in the show – pointing towards his future absence because he knew his life was going to be short. It’s a work that’s not just boundary-pushing – it’s a poignant way of raising the question of what legacy we leave.”

“With all artists, there are moments when the stuff they do seems to touch a particular nerve,” says Piper. And understandably given the themes of race and the body as a metaphor explored in his work, wider consciousness of Rodney’s work has grown since the global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. “Donald was very committed to anti-racist struggle and he was very specific about using his personal experience with illness to unlock wider issues around empire, history and stereotypes,” says Piper.

“Donald was an incredibly ambitious artist,” says Tawadros. “He wanted to have a wing of the Tate named after him but his longtime partner, Diane Symons, said to me: ‘[A retrospective at] Whitechapel gallery is the next best thing’.” It’s a mark of Rodney’s influence and staying power that Tawadros holds out hope that maybe one day the Tate will come round. “How many artists have wings – there’s the Turner wing! Maybe one day there will be a Donald Rodney one. too. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”