Donald Locke Symposium: Edge of Spirit

Delivered by Martin Clark

Giulia Smith and Grace Aneiza Ali, in conversation with Robert Leckie (50 mins)

Shamica Ruddock and Indra Khanna. Chaired by David A. Bailey (50 mins)

Comfort break (20 mins)

Phoebe Collings-James and Dr Marsha Pearce. Chaired by Dr Jake Subryan Richards (50 mins)

Comfort break (20 mins)

Gina Buenfeld-Murley and Brenda Locke (50 mins)

Reading by Imani Mason Jordan (30 mins)

(15 mins)

Martin Clark is a curator and writer. He is Director of Camden Art Centre (2017-now), and previously Director of Bergen Kunsthall, Norway and Tate St Ives, Cornwall. Over the last 25 years he has curated and organised over 100 exhibitions, most recently: Karimah Ashadu, Tendered; Nat Faulkner, Strong Water; Richard Wright; Nicola L. I Am The Last Woman Object; Gregg Bordowitz, There: a Feeling and Lonnie Holley, All Rendered Truth. He is an advisor for Art on the Underground and was a judge for the 2023 Turner Prize jury. He has written widely on contemporary art and artists. He lives and works in London.

Dr Giulia Smith specialises in modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on the legacies of empire in Britain and across the Atlantic world. Titled Living Landscapes: Art, Environment and Decolonisation from Guyana to the World, her current book project considers contemporary and historic artistic practices that mobilise geophysical entities and climatic phenomena against colonial and neo-colonial regimes of oppression and environmental exploitation.

Publications relating to this research include ‘Cosmic Hinterland: Aubrey Williams’s Ecological Vision’, in Aubrey Williams: Art, Histories, Futures (PMC/Yale University Press, 2024); ‘Lessons from the Eco-Caribbean’ for ‘The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis: Conversation Piece’, British Art Studies, vol. 18 (November 2020); and ‘Nature Erupts into Orchestras of Nemesis: The Ecological Imaginary of the Transnational Caribbean’ for the catalogue of Life Between Islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s¬–Now (Tate Britain, 2021-22). In 2023, Dr Smith published an essay on Antonius Roberts for the catalogue of ‘Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology and Sacred Space’, a retrospective curated by Professor Krista Thompson at The National Gallery of the Bahamas (‘Sylvan Ancestors and Militant Trees: Arboreal Resistance in the Work of Antonius Roberts’, 2023).

In 2021, Dr Giulia Smith and Dr Kate Keohane organised a series of online seminars titled ‘Biotic Resistance: Eco-Caribbean Visions in Art and Exhibition Practice’ with support from a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and a Paul Mellon Centre Event Support Grant. The proceedings of this international series have been turned into a large edited volume titled Caribbean Eco-Aesthetics: Strategies for Survival Through Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2026).

Grace Aneiza Ali is a curator, writer, and professor whose work engages global contemporary art and migration. She is attentive to migration’s ruptures, what remains in its wake, and its quiet aftermath. Her curatorial research practice reimagines migration not simply as departure and arrival, but as a reciprocal relationship between the ones who leave and the ones who are left.

Her writing has been commissioned by major international exhibition platforms, including La Biennale di Venezia, Sharjah Biennial, and Prospect New Orleans. Ali’s research also focuses on art of the Caribbean Diaspora, with particular attention to her homeland Guyana. Her book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora, is the first to examine the artistic and migratory narratives of women of Guyanese heritage, foregrounding a community long absent from dominant art-historical accounts.

Ali is currently Curator for the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice at Vanderbilt University—founded by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. She previously served as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York City.

Ali is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History and affiliated faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center at Florida State University (FSU), where she received the University Provost Award for Inclusive Teaching. Prior to joining FSU, she was Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the M.A. Arts Politics program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Ali serves as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal Open, the open-access journal of the College Art Association. She is also the founder and former editorial director of OF NOTE Magazine (2009–2019), an award-winning nonprofit arts journalism initiative—now archived—that reported on the intersection of art and activism. She serves on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, on the International Advisory Board for British Art Studies (Paul Mellon Centre for British Art) and the Advisory Board for The Frank Bowling Foundation in London.

Her research has received fellowships ranging from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library (Los Angeles), Stuart A. Rose Library Fellowship, Emory University (Atlanta), New York University Provost Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. A frequent speaker at universities, conferences, museums, and biennales, she has delivered keynotes and talks at The Royal Academy of Art (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Sharjah Art Foundation, World Economic Forum (Davos), Kulturhistorisk Museum (Oslo), Havana Biennial and Bienal de São Paulo.

Ali has been recognized by ARTnews as one of The Deciders and by the World Economic Forum as a Global Shaper. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Burnaway Magazine, Ms. Magazine, GOOD Magazine, Contemporary &, among others.

She earned a M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University and a B.A. in English Literature with a concentration in African Diaspora Literature and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she graduated magna cum laude.

Robert Leckie is Director of Gasworks, a leading non-profit arts organisation based in south London. He was previously Director of Spike Island in Bristol from 2018 to 2024 and Curator at Gasworks from 2011 to 2018.

Over the past decade, Robert has (co-)curated major solo and survey exhibitions by artists including Pacita Abad, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Peggy Ahwesh, Monira Al Qadiri, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Candice Lin, Rosemary Mayer, Donald Rodney, and Tanoa Sasraku.

Robert is co-editor of Sidsel Meineche Hansen: SECOND SEX WAR (Paraguay Press, 2019), Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines (Mousse Publishing, 2021), Candice Lin: Pigs and Poison (Mousse Publishing, 2023), Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching (König, 2023), and Donald Rodney: A Reader (Whitechapel Gallery, 2025).

Robert was a jury member for the 2022 Turner Prize and is currently curating a major touring exhibition on Guyanese artist Donald Locke, which opens at Spike Island in May this year before touring to Ikon in Birmingham and Camden Arts Centre in London during 2025-26.

Shamica Ruddock is an artist-composer working across film, installations and live performance. Her experiments in sound are informed by a core investment in the sonic as a site for knowledge production, with narrative, allegory and the linguistic function of drum language as core departure points.

Recent projects include Palimpsests & Epithets, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Taiwan and Skēnē, Malmö; A Reverberant Shadow, Post-National Digital Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (all 2024); Deciphering a Broken Syntax, South London Gallery; and Something More Than Masquerade, Make Film History x BBC Archive at Bertha DocHouse, London (both 2022). In 2021, she was a British Library Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow researching Maroon sound cultures and in 2023 Ruddock was selected as an awardee of the second edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award. Recent residencies have included Amant Foundation, New York (2023), Somerset House, London (2024) and Wysing Arts Centre (2024 – present).

Together, Jones and Ruddock have performed widely for Counterflows Festival, Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Oscillations Festival curated by QO2, Brussels; Archive Books x Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Cafe OTO, London; Madeira Dig, Portugal; Silent-Green, Berlin and La Chunky, Glasgow. They have held residencies with Wysing Art Centre, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in partnership with Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and CCA Annex where they published their ongoing project Reimagining in Conversation as an online audio-research-essay in conjunction with Triangle Studios. In addition, the duo’s text Speculation is the Vehicle has been published in Australian publication, Un-Projects and Seeking Channels, an anthology published by Well Projects, Margate.

Indra Khanna is a curator working in contemporary visual arts since 2003, developing projects independently and in partnership with established institutions such as MAC Birmingham, Deptford X, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, New Art Exchange, Aberystwyth Art Centre, Oriel Davies and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

Originally trained as a fine art printmaker at Cardiff and Chelsea, she worked as a practising artist, community artist and art teacher for fifteen years before moving into curatorial practice. She has been an active member of grass roots artists’ groups including the Association of Artists and Designers in Wales, The Printmakers Council, Stockwell Independent Artists Group, Women’s Work and Brixton Artists Collective. From 2006 to 2009 she was a member of the London regional board of the Arts Council of England.

From 2003 to 2010 Khanna worked at Autograph ABP, where she developed artist commissions, publications and exhibitions, and later became Curator. Since 2010 she has been Studio Curator for Hew Locke. From 2018 to 2020 she was Curatorial Advocate for Dinu Li, and in 2018 she founded the Caribbean Artists’ Salon. From 2020 to 2022 she was Artistic Advisor to the Litehouse Gallery.

Alongside her curatorial work, Khanna mentors artists, delivers student tutorials, gives curatorial presentations, project manages artist commissions and writes successful funding applications. Her clients include All Souls College Oxford, New Art Gallery Walsall, Hatchery Arts and Middlesex University.

David A. Bailey MBE is a photographer, writer, curator, lecturer and cultural facilitator who lives and works in London.

David’s practice is focused on the issues that relate to black representations in the areas of photography, performance and artists’ film. There interests have informed his appointment as an advisor and subsequent curator with Autograph (ABP) and the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in 1994.

One of David’s main concerns is the notion of diaspora and black representation in art. He co-curated the groundbreaking exhibitions Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance with Richard J. Powell at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1997, and Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary with Petrine Archer-Straw and Richard J. Powell at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 2005.

David has written extensively about photography and film. From 1996 to 2002, he was Co-Director of the African and Asian Visual Arts Archive (AAVAA) at the University of East London. From 2005 to 2011 he was a Curator at Platform for the Remember Saro-Wiwa Living Memorial.

Since 2006 David has been overseeing the growth and development of the ICF, and between 2009 and 2010, he was the Acting Director of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in Nassau. David was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2007, for services to art.

Phoebe Collings-James is a Jamaican British artist whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, ceramics, sound and video, with a recent focus on ceramics. Having studied fine art in London, they were introduced to ceramics in 2014 during artist residency with Nuove in Italy. In 2019 Collings-James moved from Brooklyn, USA to East London, UK, to continue their ceramics journey in the neighbourhood they grew up in. In autumn 2021, as the Freelands Ceramic Fellow they exhibited their first institutional solo show of ceramic works at Camden Arts Centre, London. In 2021 Collings-James launched Mudbelly Teaches, a free ceramics course for Black people in London, taught by Black ceramicists and artists. Recent solo exhibitions include Albuquerque Foundation, Portugal (opens February 2026); KINDL, Berlin, Germany (2025); SculptureCenter, New York, US (2024); Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2023) and Camden Arts Centre (2021). Their work is in the collection of York Art Gallery, Kadist Foundation, Arts Council England and Southampton City Art Gallery, among other places.

Dr Marsha Pearce holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and a bachelor’s degree in visual arts, both from the University of the West Indies (UWI). She has taught in the Visual Arts Unit at UWI for over a decade and worked as Unit Coordinator from 2018-2022. She also held the role of Deputy Dean of Distance and Outreach at the UWI Faculty of Humanities and Education. She has served on the board of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), and as a consultant for the Draft National Policy on Culture and the Arts of T&T. She has also worked as an assistant chief examiner for Caribbean Studies, offered as part of the Caribbean Examinations Council programme administered across the Caribbean. Her curatorial projects include a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery London and the British Council for the Americas IN Britain—Caribbean Edition online exhibition project, and her work with the Pérez Art Museum Miami to co-curate the group show The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art. She has contributed chapters to books on Caribbean Studies, Art Education, Therapeutic Cultures, Diaspora Studies and Travel and Tourism. Her commissioned essays are featured in several exhibition catalogues, contemporary art survey publications and artist monographs.

Dr. Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of the Atlantic world and global history, with interests in legal history, the history of empires, and the African diaspora. His first book, The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2025), provides a new history of slave-trade suppression. The book tells the story of people “liberated” from slaving ships by maritime patrols and then forced into bonded labour by various empires. These men and women navigated anti-slave-trade laws that both subjected them to authoritarian control and provided a domain for them to create their own visions of freedom.

Richards has published articles in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History. His current research projects focus on African political opposition to the illegal slave trade and on ecological ideas and practices among various diasporas in the Americas.

Richards’s interests in historical methods and storytelling run through his teaching and public work: he cocurated the exhibition Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2023–24). He has presented research on BBC Radio and written for History Today. Richards regularly consults with organizations, including museums, galleries, and charities, regarding historical research into slavery and emancipation and the implications of this research.

Richards earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2020) and was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University on a US-UK Fulbright Commission Postgraduate Scholarship (2016-2017). He is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Gina Buenfeld-Murley is Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre where she has curated solo exhibitions with Nat Faulkner, Jack O’Brien; Lonnie Holley; Tamara Henderson; Marina Xenofontos; Olga Balema; Adam Farah; Athanasios Argianas; Wong Ping; Yuko Mohri; Joachim Koester; and João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva. She has recently co-curated major surveys on Donald Locke and Nicola L., and has organised exhibitions on a number of important twentieth-century artists including Martin Wong and Grace Pailthorpe & Reuben Mednikoff. Her research with indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest led to a series of thematic exhibitions between 2019 – 2020 including: The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree (Camden Art Centre); Gäa: Holistic Science and Wisdom Tradition (Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Cornwall); and Origin Story (The Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland). She regularly writes on contemporary art and artists, including essays recently published on Donald Locke, Lonnie Holley, Nicola L., Emma Talbot, Raven Chacon and Cui Jie. She has had curatorial residencies at Helsinki International Curatorial Programme, Finland (2017) and Art Initiative Tokyo (2014-2015). She is currently a trustee of Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange, Cornwall, UK, holds an MA in Art History (20th Century) from Goldsmiths College (2004) and was previously Director of Alison Jacques Gallery.

Brenda Locke is an art consultant and steward of the estate of the artist Donald Locke. Following a fifty-year career in arts marketing, gallery leadership, and art consulting, including as Owner/President of Faulkner+Locke, Inc., she now focuses on the preservation and presentation of Donald’s artistic legacy.

Since 2020, she has overseen the consolidation of his extensive archive and the creation of a purpose-built studio to house and manage the collection. In 2019, she donated his papers to the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University’s African American Collections and established an annual research award in his name to support ongoing scholarship.

She has also played an active role in fostering renewed institutional and curatorial engagement with his work, supporting exhibitions, publications, and partnerships with galleries and museums. These efforts include the traveling retrospective Donald Locke: Resistant Forms, which has contributed significantly to the reassessment of his practice.

Imani Mason Jordan (they/them, born 1992 in London) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor, and curator exploring poetics and performance. Their diverse practice encompasses articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays, and love letters. Since 2016, Jordan has focused on the performative potential of poetics, oration, experimentation, and reading aloud, developing a collaborative and writing-centred performance practice that foregrounds the speaking voice. Following an MA in Forensic Architecture, their pamphlet OBJECTS WHO TESTIFY was published by PSS in 2019. Jordan directs PAPERFLESH PUBLISHING, a small press dedicated to intellectually rigorous, politically engaged Black writers. As part of Languid Hands (2019-) and SYFU (2018), Jordan has curated numerous exhibitions and public programs. At Rupert, Jordan is completing THE BOOK OF SLASH POEMS and developing the solo performance TREAD/MILL. In 2024 Mason Jordan was part of Montez Press Writers Residency.

Three ticket types are available for this event:

Concession: £15
Standard: £20
Standard + Donald Locke Catalogue: £45

Those who purchase the ticket + catalogue option will be able to pick up their copy at the event.

Booking will open on Thursday 23 April at 12pm, offered on a first come first serve basis.

If you are unable to attend please contact us no less than 48 hours before the event as we may be able to refund and re-allocate your ticket to someone of the waiting list.