Lubaina Himid

And I thought that there was something that I could try to do at the same time.

I was interested in showing the work of women artists.

So I kind of gathered a few artists and started to put on exhibitions of their work.

And two of them were Claudette Johnson and Gertrude.

Sonia Boyce and I was absolutely from the first moment I ever saw their work just completely understanding the quality of it.

And they were really young.

They're sort of about five, six, seven years younger than me.

And as I say, they didn't know each other.

They clearly very quickly came to know each other.

And I could see then that the secret of this was that every artist you met, they might be black, but we are all, of course, completely different and wanting to make completely different work.

And of course, that's not surprising if you think of black people as artists.

But when you think of, you know, as this was a sort of thing at the time, well, black people are like all the same or, you know, no one could imagine that two black people would be making art that was so different, coming from such different directions, you know.

So I wanted to show that what we were making was art.

Well, I think all artists in Britain have a struggle to get the work shown.

But we wanted to show the work to other black people, to our friends, to our families.

And so we were showing in art centres.

And actually, that wasn't so difficult because art centres were kind of more open places.

There wasn't so much gatekeeping, if you know what I mean.

They were much more interested in what would be interesting rather than what's the provenance.

Well, the absolutely packed opening.