Jump Up

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Rita Keegan was born in New York and is of Caribbean and Canadian descent. She trained as a painter at San Francisco Art Institute from 1969 to 1972 before migrating to the UK in 1980. A key and overlooked figure in the history of Black British art, in 1983, following the aftermath of the Brixton riots, Rita Keegan helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery where she curated the first exhibition by the Black Women Artists collective. In 1984, she co-founded CopyArt, a resource for community groups and artists working with computers, scanners and photocopiers, funded by a grant from the Greater London Council. Keegan was also a staff member at the Women Artists Slide Library from 1985 to 1990, where she established the Women of Colour Index – a catalogue of slides recording the work of Black women artists. Throughout this period she continued to make work which was an intersection of new media experimentation, feminist practice and the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. Rita Keegan's work was widely exhibited during the 1980s and 1990s. Group exhibitions included Trophies of Empire at the Bluecoat, curated by Keith Piper (1992); Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996 at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1996); Family Histories at 198 (1998). In 2021, Keegan had her first solo exhibition in more than 15 years at South London Gallery.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Rita Keegan (1949 - )

Title

Jump Up

Date

2022

Medium

photographic print

Dimensions

height 84.1cm; width 59.4cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, with funds raised from print sales from the Robson Orr TenTen Award, a GAC/Outset Annual Commission, 2023

Provenance

Rita Keegan Archive Project , from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 11 December 2023

GAC number

19230