Donald Rodney
Donald Rodney (18 May 1961 – 4 March 1998) was a British artist. He was a leading figure in Britain's BLK Art Group of the 1980s. Rodney's work appropriated images from the mass media, art and popular culture to explore issues of racial identity and racism.
Rodney was born and raised in Birmingham, England. He completed a pre-degree course at Bournville School of Art and went on to complete an honours degree in Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, graduating in the mid-1980s. There, he met Keith Piper, also from Birmingham. Piper was to influence Rodney’s work towards more political themes. The works of Rodney and Piper, alongside Eddie Chambers, Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson became recognised as a distinct movement within British art, known as the BLK Art Group, whose attachments were to social and political narratives. In 1987, Rodney completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Multi-Media Fine Art at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art.
Rodney had 6 solo exhibitions stemming from 1985-1997. He also showed and participated in numerous other exhibitions and residencies across this period. In 1996, he was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Sculpture and Installation. Rodney’s last solo exhibition, dedicated to the memory of his father, ‘9 Night in Eldorado’ opened at the South London Gallery in 1997.
On 4 March 1998 Rodney died from sickle-cell anaemia, aged 36.
In 2003 Rodney’s papers were donated to the Tate Archive. The exhibition Donald Rodney – In Retrospect took place at Iniva, London, 30 October–29 November 2008. In 2016, ‘Reimaging Donald Rodney’ took place at Vivid Projects, Birmingham.
