Long, vibrant fabrics weave across the front of Bath’s Holburne Museum, looping around its pillars like ribbons. Inside, the cloths unfurl from one end of the ballroom to the other. In one room dedicated to 18th-century British painting, they line the perimeter like waves, drawing your eyes with bursts of colour – transforming the space from staid to something modern and immediate.
“The cloth is occupying the space,” explains Lubaina Himid. “It’s weaving itself into the history of this museum. It’s coming out from the fabric of the building.” There are 400 metres of Dutch fabric in Lost Threads, one of the artist’s most expansive and dramatic works to date. Each cloth is intended to reflect the movement of the oceans and rivers that were used to transport cotton, yarn and enslaved people – all of which enabled parts of Britain, including Bath, to become increasingly affluent in the 18th century.
Hanging in the Holburne are paintings that bear witness to this past: Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of George Byam, a third-generation plantation owner in Antigua, and his wife Louisa, whose grandfather was involved in the Royal African Company and East India Company. Another, by Johan Zoffany, depicts a tea party in the garden of James Peter Auriol, an administrator in the East India Company. “The cloths are made for African women to make dresses for special occasions,” says Himid says. “But now they are telling an alternative history: the history of those people on the walls, how they gained their wealth, what they used it for. The installation is trying to talk to them.”
We meet behind the museum, at Sydney Gardens, which opened in 1795 and were visited by royals and Jane Austen, who lived opposite. It is all “quintessentially English”, says Himid over a tea. “Bath is the epitome of what everybody thinks and wants the country to be like. In a sense, it’s the epitome of how England became the way it is. You can only be this wealthy, stay this wealthy, because of the trading the British did.”
With her hair pulled back in her signature low bun, and dressed in a black turtleneck and cardigan, leather blazer, jeans and brogues, Himid is still the rebellious artist. After all, she’s dedicated her four-decades-long career to exposing white privilege and uncovering marginalised and silenced histories. Her work, from paintings and prints to installations, questions what it is to belong, and tries to make visible the contribution that Black people have made to countries and cultures.
Born in Zanzibar in 1954, Himid moved to Britain with her Lancastrian mother when she was four months old, after her father died from malaria. She grew up in London, where she studied theatre design at Wimbledon College of Art before receiving a master’s degree in cultural history from the Royal College of Art. She credits her mother, a textile designer, with fostering her love of fabrics. As a child, the pair would spend weekends visiting museums and department stores such as Selfridges, Liberty and Whiteleys, places she calls a “complete part of my childhood”. She explains: “In museums, you can’t touch anything. But in a department store, you perambulate around, feel the difference between silk and cotton, wool and cashmere. You can feel the weight of curtains, plump the cushions, try on the dresses.”
It’s been seven years since Himid became the first Black woman to win the Turner prize and, at the time, the oldest-ever winner at 63 – seven years in which she’s cemented her position as one of Britain’s most prominent artists. Although she wishes she had received the accolade when she was young, with an entire career ahead of her, life has undoubtedly changed since that winter night in Hull. “Thousands more people know about my art,” she says. “I was showing work in those early years, but broad audiences didn’t know about it, which meant curators never asked me to show and never acquired the work. But the Turner prize changed the opportunities.”
Himid will feature in the upcoming exhibition Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy in London, and has a show opening in March in Austin, Texas. Meanwhile, her New York gallery is showing another body of work in May. “I’m really excited about how many projects I have – and how, at last, museums and galleries are inviting me to try things, and want to work with me.” In 2021, she also had a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London – becoming only the fourth living British artist to be honoured with a retrospective at the venue. “It was pretty amazing,” she says, though she caveats that she’s “not that interested in survey shows, because you see a whole life going back”.
Success, Himid knows only too well, did not come overnight. In the early 80s, she was one of the pioneers of the British Black Arts Movement, alongside the likes of Sonia Boyce, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Claudette Johnson. But for decades, the women failed to receive serious critical attention. It has only been in recent years, late in their careers, that they’ve received prestigious prizes and shows. (Boyce represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 2022 and won the Golden Lion, Ryan won the Turner in the same year, Pollard has been nominated and an exhibition of Johnson’s work just ended at London’s Courtauld).
The irony isn’t lost on Himid, who from the beginning of her career has worked tirelessly to champion her peers, curating countless exhibitions to present their work. For one, The Thin Black Line at London’s ICA in 1985, she was given a mere 20 by 2-metre corridor to fill. So she decided to display the work of 11 Black and Asian women artists, including herself, to illustrate that there wasn’t enough room for the amount of visual endeavour being produced – both literally and figuratively. Trying to break down the barriers in those days was a constant “slog”, she recalls.
The change has been “massive”, says the artist. “And it is real change, because they’re real artists with real work, and these are real venues. Real audiences come – and journalists and collectors are interested. But I think there is a sense of, ‘We should do this now because we didn’t do it then.’ Well, yeah, you were there, you could have done it then, and you didn’t. We know who you are. We’ll take it now, because we think we can still make a difference. But all of us long for a day where artists can be just seen as artists, rather than a box-ticking exercise.”
Where has her passion to help other artists come from? She smiles knowingly. “I’ve been to tons of openings, dinners, stuff where I’m the only Black person. And I never wanted to be the only one. Being the only woman of colour, or person of colour, in a cultural landscape is like going to a city and only ever seeing men. Even if they’re not nasty to you, isn’t it exhausting not to be able to see yourself? So I wanted to build a cultural world where I could see other people of colour around me.”
Today, Himid is professor of contemporary art at Central Lancashire University in Preston, the city she moved to at the age of 36. She recalls biting the bullet after years of doing odd jobs to pay the bills in London, including community work and waitressing. “There was no way you could get a job as a Black artist in the London art schools,” she says. But being outside the bubble “made such a difference. I had time to make art, and I wasn’t looking over my shoulder or worried about recognition. There was more air to breathe, more oxygen in all kinds of different ways.”
The artist turns 70 this year, and she’s feeling philosophical. “The older I get,” she says, “the more confident I am that the more you know, the more you need to know. Every single situation, every war, every conflict, every local difficulty, is never just black and white. Histories have repeated themselves time and time again, even in my lifetime.” She feels “exasperated” by how long you would actually have to live to make any kind of difference. “Sure, as a politician, you’ve got a better chance of doing things quicker. But as an artist, it’s a long, slow business of always trying to encourage people to talk to each other, to read more, to listen more, to think more, and to have a conversation with each other.”
But you never know, I say, which future politician or thinker is going to see your work and feel inspired. She looks instantly energised. “That is the purpose of doing it. I see the work as a performance and the audience as part of that. Of course, it exists if nobody’s there, but it doesn’t quite exist in the same way.”
Himid plans to work until she’s about 80, then she’ll “go to Capri, sit about and look at the sea”. But in the last couple of years, she has noticed a shift in her work. “When I was much younger, I was making more of what I would qualify as ‘fuck you work’. As I got older, I thought I could be more subtle, and my work became a call to arms to other Black women to stake our claim in the cultural landscape.”
And now? Much of her paintings focus on the quiet moments in everyday life. “The moment between a question and an answer. Those ordinary questions people ask, like, ‘Do you want to go out for a drink with me?’ – and that second of potential, where your whole life takes a different turn because you said yes or no.”
When I ask what she hopes audiences will take away from Lost Threads, the answer feels like it could also apply to those who ever doubted her. “That behind and underneath everything are layers. In exactly the same way as when people meet for the first time, they look at what you look like, what you’re wearing – but you know that there are many, many layers to you. So try to find out what’s behind the cities you’re in, the people you talk to, all the food you eat. None of these things are accidental, or just about what a newspaper might say today. There are long, complicated histories as to why the world is balanced the way it is.”
Lost Threads is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, 19 January to 21 April.
