RIBA + Grimshaw Foundation Annual Art Lecture: Hew Locke & Ekow Eshun

The RIBA + Grimshaw Foundation Annual Art Lecture brings together the interdisciplinary worlds of art and architecture, celebrating artists from around the world and their relationship with the built environment.

The 2024 lecture will be given by Guyanese-British sculptor Hew Locke, followed by a conversation and questions with writer and curator, Ekow Eshun.

Chair - Ekow Eshun

Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Described by Vogue as “the most inspired - and inspiring - curator in Britain”, his most recent museum exhibition is The Time Is Always Now, a landmark study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art, currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2022, he curated the critically acclaimed exhibition, In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward Gallery, London, for which he was awarded the Curatorial Prize by the Association for Art History. Eshun is the author of books including The Strangers, Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize for its exploration of race and identity, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize. He is the writer and presenter of documentaries including the BBC film Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture, the BBC Radio 4 series White Mischief, and the Tate Modern short film series, Exploring the Black Atlantic. His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times and The Guardian and he has contributed catalogue essays on artists including Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, Chris Ofili, John Akomfrah, Deborah Roberts and Wangechi Mutu. He is a judge for the Turner Prize 2024, and was a member of the jury for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024.

Keynote - Hew Locke

Locke was born in Edinburgh, UK, in 1959; lived from 1966 to 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana; and is currently based in London. He completed his MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. In 2022 he was elected a member of The Royal Academy of Arts, and was made an OBE in 2023.

Locke explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, imagery and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks.

His work includes sculptures and paintings of Caribbean vernacular architecture, immersive cardboard environments drawing on the baroque and fairground rides, and drawings of architecture.

In 2022 he revealed ‘Gilt’. The Façade Commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which engaged with the architecture of the museum and the concept of ‘the façade’. In the same year his Tate Britain Duveen Hall commission ‘The Procession’ claimed the grand neo-classical galleries at the centre of Tate Britain.

In October this year his major co-curated exhibition at the British Museum ‘What have we here?’ opened, which combines work from the museum collection with pieces of his own work, exploring how the Museum collection reflects the legacies of British imperial power.