Lubaina Himid

i don't know a cinema near you next week and took all of us and i don't know put us in a spaceship took us to somewhere else we were not just sitting there waiting for that to be happening i was a painter you were a broadcaster journalist other people were dustmen and doctors those enslaved people

Those captured Africans were somebody.

They had names, they had families, and they were doing something.

Well, you can walk amongst them.

You can be part of that scene.

It's not something that's over there.

It's something that's in the room with you.

Well, she was quite elderly by the time I won the Turner Prize.

You know, she died in 2020 and I won the Turner Prize in 2017.

She got to see it then?

She got to see it on the telly.

But that's all right.

and she was really enthusiastic and supportive.

And even when she was really quite elderly, I'd go and see her, and on my phone I'd show her what I was painting, and she still had a comment to make about, I think his nose could have been painted a bit better than that, or something made her laugh, or she liked it.

Her enthusiasm was still...

there really and pride yeah amazingly that did kind of surprise me but yeah

Well, all three of us come from a completely different sort of direction, if you like.

But I was trying to make a difference.

And I was at the Royal College of Art doing cultural history, an MA in cultural history, and writing about young black artists in Britain in the early 1980s.

And I came across the Black Art Group, who were working in the Midlands.