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. What key themes underpin Donald Rodney's work?

Jeremy Akerman

The usual ones, the big ones, the obvious ones. He also made important work about disability and social exclusion that many curators would still struggle to include in exhibitions i.e. the wheelchair that moves around by itself. He always wanted to make a sugar Tate, that is a direct copy of Tate to scale in sugar cubes, a critique about the Tate, its history and social standing in venerated society not to mention comment on other art works like Carl Andre’s bricks.

Virginia Nimarkoh

Well, it varied over the course of his career. But whilst I knew him: the body, pain, mortality, race, masculinity - you know, the kind of big themes that artists like to take on.

Eddie Chambers

The nature and the experience of Blackness.

Michael Tooby

I agree with those who say that, as well as the work being about black experience, it is also about the possibilities of making art in a certain way, with a definite voice and definite audiences in mind. This was characteristic of a generation who emerged in the mid-1980s, white artists largely from non-London British art colleges, as well as of people like the original members of the Blk Art Group and their Black and Asian contemporaries. It is essential to say, though, that even when the work is apparently at its most romantic, or allusive, or generalised, the fundamental resonance is the voice of a black man of his generation in Britain.

Donald Rodney's work is extremely good. In that respect it conforms to Walter Benjamin's dictum that while not all political art is great, all great art is political. I also remember having a characteristically uncontrollable mutual laughing attack when we both admitted that when we were students we were interested in Walter Benjamin but had no idea who this bloke Valta Benyameen was who all the other students were going on about.

Elizabeth Ann McGregor

The themes that concerned many black artists in the 80s: the impact of colonialism all over the world, racism and its effect on black people in Britain, media distortions, police brutality; family identity and the diseased body came into greater prominence as his body disintegrated owing to illness.

David Lawson

The key themes that underpin Donald's work were race, the body, questions of aesthetics and nature. He wanted to go back to flower painting at some point, especially Sunflowers.

David Thorp

The key theme of Donald's work was the social position of the black person in a predominantly white society. In order to explore this Donald employed a variety of strategies that were largely based upon a highly personal account of the world he experienced. He explored his own history and that of his family as immigrants to the UK in works like Land of Milk and Honey and In the House of My Father and he used his illness as a metaphor with which he expressed the marginalisation of the black and disabled.

Mark Sealy

There are keepings with his work. One: is his relationship to the state and politics. Two: is his relationship to the body as a political space, both internally and externally. Three: he was really interested in working with new media and new technologies. One of the great tragedies is that he was becoming very articulate within this space around the end of his career. While a lot of the early work was about montage and mapping ideas out, he became more articulate near the end of his work. Pieces like The House of the Father were particularly interesting really. Those little constructed scenarios that he developed were very strong. It was not just about race and politics it’s also about the emotive space that Donald was occupying, the constant sense of tension and irony within his work.

Marlene Smith

Irony, comic book, comic strip, popularism, humour, archive, collection, meaning, power, empire, history, the black male body, pain, race, diaspora… Donald spoke really beautifully about his family, the church, the institutions, belief systems, and customs. He was analytical but also very loving and had a really profound sense of self. Self portrait is a recurring form. There is also a very careful, considered use of written text/language.