Lubaina Himid

My mum and my auntie could come with me and I thought, well, I've spent all these years trying to make us visible.

I was going to take the medal for it.

Yeah, but we had called us... I mean, I called the shows that I put on Five Black Women at the Africa Centre, Black Woman Time Now, which is a Battersea Arts Centre, and The Thin Black Line.

I felt at the time, rightly or wrongly, that I needed to make a box so that we could be seen and heard.

And we have had to spend quite a few decades sort of jumping out of that box to make it work.

But I did it that way and other people did it another way.

Yes.

I think probably by then whoever sorts out these things was understanding much more about the artists that I was surrounded by and that were my colleagues and my friends that they actually were all making work of deep quality.

I think it was finally acknowledged by a lot of different people.

Well, he's kind of a bitter, nasty man.

And in the process of being pretty much a realist, I suppose, of London life, being rude about the French, about the Italians, about the aristocracy...

and about what he saw as black people, you know, hanging out, doing nothing on the streets of London, he showed me that there were black people here before the 1950s and the 1960s, clearly part of British culture.

I love the way he makes engravings in series, in kind of dramatic ways,

play like series i love the fact that everyone gets it you know everyone is rubbished in that way that british caricaturists used to do crookshank gilray all those guys are rude about kings they're rude about politicians they're rude about women they're absolutely vile i think it's a kind of cornerstone of what british visual art is it started then to be honest but

So I loved the way that in that process of being so critical, he was actually doing us all a favour and giving a true picture of British life.

I love the drama of it.

You can see yourself in every one of those scenes, you know, the rakes progress or marriage a la mode or, you know, any of those.

The very basic thing I was trying to do was show that the art world was as rotten and corrupt as the negotiations between Thatcher and Reagan.

So that this was a kind of insider, rather vulgar, repulsive marriage that was going on.

That's right.