| Intro.
Q. How did you first meet Donald Rodney?
Q. What would Donald Rodney have thought
about having his archives donated to Tate?
Q. What was Donald Rodney's involvement in
the Black Art movement of the 1980s?
Q. What was Donald Rodney's work about when
you met him?
Q. What key themes underpin Donald Rodney's
work?
Q. How do you feel about Black History Month?
Q. How
did you first meet Donald Rodney?
Jeremy Akerman
I met Donald at the opening of the museum of
modern art in Dublin. He walked with the aid of a stick and
had a sort of leather cap or hat worn at an angle. He laughed
a lot especially about anything that took the piss out of
the situation we were in: the opening, each other, the café,
the hotel, etc. The opening was very grand, certainly the
grandest I'd ever experienced at that time. Oysters and Guinness,
salmon and champagne came raining down from the silver platters
the army of waiters held overhead to get through the thick
crowds. Later we walked a little and posed together as a group
for our photo on a railway platform, somewhere, don't remember
where. This is probably the only time I walked with Donald;
I didn't see him for quite a while after Dublin by which time
he'd become increasingly laid up with pain. Later that night
we (our group) danced at this arts disco thing, which was
nerdy and funny.
Virginia Nimarkoh
I think it was an event related to his solo
show at Camerawork Gallery in 1991. We only met very briefly.
We became friends a year or so later.
Eddie Chambers
I first met Donald through Keith Piper, when
they were both students at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham.
This must have been late in 1981. From the start, Donald had
a very lively and exuberant personality.
Michael Tooby
I first met him through his work, which I saw
in my home town of Coventry in 1983. I think I must have then
met him in person in the company of Eddie Chambers or Keith
Piper or Pogus Caesar or Lubaina Himid whilst Pogus and Lubaina
were co-curating Into the Open, a show I worked on
the year after, and in which he didn't feature. Thereafter
we saw quite a lot of each other while we were developing
new work for a show I curated, Depicting History : For
Today in 1987.
I was amazed to find that the maker of what
I had seen as such powerful, angry work was so warm, funny,
gentle. He seemed to smile all the time, except when his conversation
became very serious; then he gathered a kind of quiet reflectiveness.
Only when I got the doublethink book, a monograph
on his work, did I fully understand the fact that Lubaina
Himid had pointed up Donald's tendency to weave witty jokes
into the work in her review of that 1983 show, and I had simply
not seen it in the detail of the over-riding impact of the
work.
Elizabeth Ann McGregor
I first met Donald when I was Director of Ikon
Gallery and he was interested in becoming a curator. We appointed
him as a trainee in exhibition organisation. However, he never
stopped making his own work - he saw the curatorship as a
way of getting an insight into exhibition organisation and
making contact with other artists. One of the highlights of
his traineeship was working with me on the first restrospective
in Europe of the work of African American artist Adrian Piper.
I think travelling with me to the US to meet with Adrian and
working on her exhibition made a great impact on him.
David Lawson
I first met Donald Rodney at a private view
of a group show of black artists in Kings Cross in the mid-1980s.
He had been working with Keith Piper and they were seen as
two of the key visual artists working around race, representation
and the re imagination of black life in Britain. Donald was
a reflective and serious serious artist, who channelled any
anger or pain that he suffered from sickle cell anemia through
his work and his sense of humour.
David Thorp
I knew Donald Rodney's work before I
knew him. I was aware of him as an artist who was taking a
serious and very personal approach to the broader social and
political issues that black artists had to contend with by
using the ills of his own body as a metaphor for those that
confront black people, generally, and black artists, particularly,
in British society. I got to know Donald personally when I
invited him to have an exhibition of his work at the South
London Gallery in 1997. We discussed the show in detail over
some months. At that time he was quite seriously disabled
by his illness and lived in Peckham in a purpose built flat
that allowed him the wheelchair access he needed. In the later
planning stages of the exhibition Donald was in hospital for
most of the time and I would go down to Camberwell to see
him in bed on the ward surrounded by art magazines, videos
and cd's.
I would describe Donald as a lovely chap. His treatment included
regular injections of iron to combat the sickle cell anaemia
which I think were painful but Donald always seemed cheerful
when I saw him. He had a sunny disposition and, while very
focused on his art and very sure about what he wanted to achieve,
was mild mannered and gentle by nature. On the evening of
the opening of his exhibition Donald was too unwell to leave
the hospital and come to the gallery, so we had a reception
and dinner of Caribbean food in a room in the hospital. Donald
came in his wheelchair and was in very good form.
Mark Sealy
I think I first met Donald in something
like 1985, at a woman called Amanda Holiday’s house,
who I think was a graduate from Wimbledon. In those days there
used to be little gatherings of black artists and Donald was
around. It was the beginning of lots of activity, those heady
days of the Greater London Council and the Elbow Room, places
like that where you were just beginning to meet and network.
There was a real sense of openness and shared experiences
around that. Donald was always lively—although intensely
political around his work—he was also a lively, sociable
and accessible kind of character.
Marlene Smith
I first met Donald en route to our first meeting
of the Blk Art Group. That must have been the summer of 1982.
Keith Piper had ‘recruited’ us, (Donald at Trent
Poly, me at an opening of a black art group show at the Ikon)
and we had arranged to meet somewhere in Birmingham city centre,
I can’t remember where now, in order to travel together
to Eddie Chambers’ parents’ house in Wolverhampton.
Donald, Keith and I took the train together. Donald was loud,
rude and very annoying. I remember him hitting me with the
Sunday papers. He seemed to have bought all of them—tabloids,
broadsheets everything. I would find out later that he was
obsessive about newspapers, obsessive about most forms of
popular culture; pop music, magazines, films...
Once we got to the meeting he was very different,
very thoughtful, very quiet, very serious. He later told me
that he had been in awe of Claudette Johnson. She always spoke
so eloquently. Donald was an enthusiast, prolific in his musings,
often extremely funny, full of energy. Whenever I think about
him, it is his humour that comes to mind first of all and
then the immense depths that lay behind it.
Then there are those aspects of Donald's life
that were far from fun. His sickle cell is also a prominent
part of my memories of him. I remember the two of us setting
off from Nottingham, where he was an undergraduate student
sharing digs with Keith Piper and where many Blk Art Group
meetings would take place. We took the 99 bus to Birmingham,
where we were both going to see our families. As students
it was the cheapest way to travel. At the start of the journey,
Donald was in great rambunctious form, noisily critiquing
the latest big movie, talking about the impact and contradictions
of the black church, speculating on his own prognosis. By
the time the temperature had dropped and we rolled into a
deserted Birmingham Midland red bus station, some two and
a half hour later, he was in crisis.
Like many of Donald's comrades and colleagues,
I have seen him in unbearable pain many, many times. His bravery
was humbling to witness. He was always working, play was work.
I am sure that his very profound sense of his own mortality
made it impossible for him to waste time.
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