Rita Keegan

Rita Keegan has generously produced a limited edition print on the occasion of the exhibition, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, at Tate Britain, 8 November 2023 – 7 April 2024.

Keegan’s limited edition for Tate draws on her rich history of working with photocopy and collage. Made especially for Tate, Keegan has created a new work of “CopyArt”, a medium developed in the 1980s which combined elements of photography, collage and graphic arts with the technology of photocopiers. Her CopyArt collage, which has been reproduced as a pigment print with screen-printed details, features a portrait of herself as a young artist, gazing ahead, face nestled in an abundant spray of coloured blooms. The portrait was taken by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a Nigerian-born photographer who explored sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. Keegan describes her practice as a response to “a feminist perspective” of “putting yourself in the picture”. In talking about her process, Keegan explains: “I've always felt that to tear somebody's face can be quite violent, but if you're doing that to your own face, you've given yourself permission, so it's no longer a violent act. It's a deconstructive act. It's a way of looking.”

Each print is signed and numbered by the artist and comes unframed. Prices of the artwork are liable to change. As a limited edition sells out, prices of the artwork are subject to increase and the price will be clearly indicated.

• Artist Rita Keegan
• Artwork Rose Garden Remembered
• Exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990
• Dimensions 36 x 49 cm
• Material Digital pigment print with screen-printed details on Somerset paper
• Edition Edition of 40 - signed and numbered on the front
• Date of work 2024

Rita Keegan (b.1949, Bronx, New York, USA) is an artist, lecturer and archivist of Caribbean and Black-Canadian descent. Having graduated with a fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1972, she moved to the UK in the late 1970s, settling in London. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings, Rita helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery, curating Mirror Reflecting Darkly, the first exhibition by The Black Women Artists collective in 1982 and became an important figure in the Black Arts Movement. Keegan works across print, photography, film, sound and installation. Her work considers the representation of Black communities historically and acts of self-fashioning in relation to the experience of Black women, often through self-portraiture. Using her extensive family archive – a photographic record of a black middle class Canadian family, dating from 1890s to present day, she employs images and fragments from this archive to create monoprint collages. In 1984 Keegan founded CopyArt, a resource centre set up to facilitate community activist workshops and produce print materials, and in 1985 she established the Women Artists of Colour Index, to catalogue, document and remember the work of Black women artists.

Selected solo exhibitions include, Somewhere Between There and Here, South London Gallery, UK (2021); Transformations, Lewisham Arthouse and Horniman Museum, London, UK (2006); Family Histories,198 Gallery, Brixton, London, UK (1998); Selected group exhibitions include; Citational Choices, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia (2023); RA summer Exhibition, London, UK (2021); Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Caribbean Cultural Center (Manhattan), New York, USA (1997); Iniva and the British Museum, Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art, London UK (1995). Keegan’s work is held in the Tate and Government Art Collections. She lives and work in London, UK.