Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic

Donald Rodney (1961-1998) was one of the most gifted, perceptive, and innovative contemporary British artists of his time. A protagonist from the first generation of Black British-born art students in the early 1980s, Rodney and his peers brought a new dynamic to British art – a hitherto unseen interplay between aesthetics, politics, humour and Black consciousness. Donald Rodney: Art, Race and the Body Politic is the first book-length study of a protean practice which spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990s and included a prodigious output of work across painting, photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, and new technologies. Across eight meticulously researched chapters, the book examines the social and cultural events which inspired Rodney's artwork and the responses it elicited. From his formative years in the West Midlands as a leading exponent of ‘Black Art’, to a subsequent decade of unbridled visual innovation and social critique, the book ventures new detailed analyses of key works, exhibitions, artistic influences and collaborations. Deploying recurring metaphors of the ‘diseased’, traumatised and ‘raced’ body, Rodney addressed racial and social inequality, legacies of slavery, police brutality, sport, and Black male identity in novel and powerful ways. Attending to the artist’s material dexterity and visual acuity, the book considers how and why Rodney’s innovative practice uniquely challenged delineations between the political and non-political, personal and public, representation and visibility. Over a generation has passed since Rodney’s premature death from the effects of the hereditary blood disorder sickle cell anaemia at aged thirty-six. Despite this, Rodney's work continues to speak to our contemporary moment in a multiplicity of ways. As such, the book provides a much-needed critical perspective and insight to the work and legacy of a nonpareil British artist.