A solo exhibition at Bristol’s Spike Island gallery has earned artist Lubaina Himid a place on the 2017 Turner Prize shortlist.
Navigation Charts, staged at the gallery between January and March, drew together paintings and installations from the late 1990s to the present day to consider issues of labour, migration and creativity. 
It included Naming the Money (2004), the largest installation to make use of Ms Himid’s signature ‘cut-outs’ — paintings made on freestanding, shaped board allowing viewers to walk amongst them.
The 100 cut-outs represented African slaves in the royal courts of 18-century Europe, put to work as ceramicists, herbalists, toy makers, dog trainers, viola da gamba players, drummers, dancers, shoemakers, map makers and painters.
Navigation Charts took place at Spike Island simultaneously with two other major UK presentations of Himid’s work: Invisible Strategies, a solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, and The Place is Here, a group show at Nottingham Contemporary which traces conversations between black artists, writers and thinkers in 1980s Britain.
Born in Zanzibar, Ms Himid was a member of the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s and is now a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. She has worked over three decades on paintings, drawings and installations which “celebrate black creativity and the people of the African diaspora”, the Turner Prize judges said. Her work is politically critical, tackling questions of race, gender and class. She has been described by The Telegraph as “the under-appreciated hero of black British art”.
Read more about Ms Himid’s exhibition at Spike Island here.
Also on the Turner Prize shortlist are Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner and Rosalind Nashashibi.
Pictured: Naming the Money. Photo courtesy of the artist and Spike Island
