Donald Locke

Donald Locke (born September 17, 1930, in Stewartville, Guyana – died December 6, 2010) was a Guyanese artist whose multidisciplinary practice explored colonialism, labor, mythology, ritual, memory, and the material histories of Guyana and the wider Black Atlantic. Working across painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, and mixed media, Locke examined landscape, power, and cultural inheritance through abstraction, symbolic form, and experimental use of materials.  Locke studied first in Guyana and later in the United Kingdom, where he received scholarships to attend Bath Academy of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. His work often engages Caribbean history, plantation geography, spiritual symbolism, and the afterlives of empire, using ceramics, wood, metal, painting, drawing, and assemblage to consider both formal invention and historical violence. Over the course of his career he lived and worked in Guyana, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with his final decades spent in Atlanta.  His work has been the subject of major recent survey exhibitions including Donald Locke: Nexus and Donald Locke: Resistant Forms, and it is held in public collections including Tate, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, and Clark Atlanta University. Donald Locke lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia.