Lubaina Himid

Repair Jobs (2025) is part of Himid’s series of ‘How Can I Help You?’ paintings, included in her solo exhibition Another Chance Encounter at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2025). Each of the paintings is a full length double portrait of two men – a merchant and a customer – interacting at the threshold of a shop. The men negotiate one another, some touching, some keeping a wary distance. Some are posed in their finest attire; others are apron draped or in looser garments to facilitate a day’s work. The drama of each encounter is framed by an open door which variously seems to pull the action inward or repel it outward.

For more than four decades, Lubaina Himid has created paintings, drawings and installations that uncover and celebrate marginalised histories, figures, and cultural expressions. Her work frequently redresses the art historical canon as a means to probe the (in)visibility of the Black body in the Western pictorial tradition. Countering such selective histories and narratives, Himid’s work presents stories, characters and voices through vibrant colours and forms, rich imagery, and diverse references from poetry.

In Himid’s ongoing Men in Drawers series, begun in 2014–15, found or discarded drawers are repurposed as supports for painted portraits of individual Black figures, and act as containers for lost and forgotten lives. Himid writes: ‘The drawers tell the story of people in search of home who constantly have to move in order to find it and as a result leave traces of themselves behind each time they leave a particular place.’

Himid’s Aunties (2023), first exhibited in her solo exhibitions Make Do and Mend at the Contemporary Austin, Texas and the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2024) is a series of 64 plank paintings which recall her previous plank works and evoke the form of funerary objects from East Africa. The title references the figure of the ‘auntie’, an interstitial role that is both familial and friend. Constructed from architectural remnants, bits of furniture, floorboards, and travel crates, which are then painted and embellished with a variety of objects, each plank embodies a unique character, underscoring the a’s ongoing interest in the politics of discarded materials. 

Himid has likened the Aunties to a gathering of the women in one’s life who are neither mothers nor grandmothers; it is a memorial to the friends of one’s family and to the women hanging around the house. For Himid, the auntie is a figure for whom there are no fixed rules and who defies the normative codes of relations. As Zoé Whitley writes: ‘Aunties real and invented flood to mind when viewing himid’s Aunties. They stand tall and erect; a few slouch nonchalantly. They are a formidable group and individually alluring. They hold space for one another and for each of us, too – a chosen family congregating to pay respect to our aunties.’

Each work in Himid’s series of ‘Strategy Paintings’ (2023), exhibited in her solo exhibitions Make Do and Mend at the Contemporary Austin, Texas and the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2024) depicts Black men and women seated around tables in the act of solving a particular problem.

In Divided Loyalties a female figure sits – at first glance – alone at a bright blue table, with nothing but a kettle and a glass in front of her, an open doorway with a golden-pink beach and dark stormy sea visible behind her and a purple lamp hanging above. She raises one green-gloved hand while the other rests on the table as though to steady herself before making an important decision. On either side of her are the traces of two figures, perhaps her ancestors, whose handprints are visible on the yellow sleeve of her jacket. Her loyalties are divided – but by whom or by what? What kind of decision is she being asked to make? According to Himid, her protagonist is ‘working on a plan for equality’ asking ‘What is privilege?’ and ‘Who deserves what? The painting is concerned with ‘working out who is at the table, who should be at the table, how to be at the table, stay at the table, and bring back those who have been banished from the table.

As with many interior scenes painted by Lubaina Himid, in Sometimes you don’t know what you’re getting until it’s too late (2020) Himid composes a group portrait blending a provisional sense of comfort and safety with a portentous, encroaching danger. A figure, occupying the centre of the painting, stands beside a kitchenette and holds a goldfinch.

The Operating Table, is a continuation of a body of work comprising Six Tailors and Three Architects, (both 2019). In this painting, three women of colour are depicted in action, working together but not necessarily in agreement. As with Six Tailors and Three Architects, this work engages with the tradition of history painting in the Western canon, a genre in which epic and heroic scenes of European men are predominant. Himid’s work in this series ushers in diverse, active protagonists, expanding the gamut of narratives in painting.

Old Boat / New Money (2019) is an installation of 32 leaning wooden planks in varying shades of grey. The ship-like arrangement and the painted cowry shells evoke histories of the transatlantic slave trade, and more broadly the invisible legacies of colonial exploitation that remain inscribed in art and architecture. 

Himid’s Kanga series draws from ‘kangas’—vibrant cotton rectangular fabric traditionally worn by East African women as a shawl, head scarf, baby carrier, and many other ways. Addressing the kangas’ association with identity and personal styling, Himid’s works are emblazoned with evocative slogans, bold patterns and vibrant colours.

Naming the Money, 2004, is an installation composed of 100 cut-outs – figurative paintings created on freestanding, shaped board that allow viewers to walk among them. The cut-out figures in this work represent African slaves in the royal courts of 18th century Europe, put to work in such roles as ceramicists, herbalists, toy makers, dog trainers, shoemakers, map makers and painters. A soundtrack gives voice to the figures, which relay their fluid identities shaped by, and formed in reaction to, global political and economic powers.

Himid’s installation A Fashionable Marriage, 1986, is based on British artist William Hogarth’s 1734 satirical work Marriage a la Mode, which attempted to expose the greed, fashionable excesses and exploitation of affluent 18th century London life. With equal wit, Himid’s installation quotes the compositions in Hogarth’s work to deliver a critique of London’s art scene of the 1980s.