Artist Talk: Sonia Boyce

Join us in the Horchow Auditorium for a lively conversation between the acclaimed British interdisciplinary artist Sonia Boyce and Ade Omotosho, the DMA's Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. Boyce will reflect on her Concourse mural commission, One Hundred Ways to Love, and trace the abiding preoccupations that have shaped her four-decade-long artistic practice.

On view now in the DMA’s Concourse, One Hundred Ways to Love brings together the artist’s twin fascinations with music and repeated patterns. The sprawling installation, inspired by a wallpaper design drawing in the DMA’s permanent collection, unfolds like a playlist of sorts, punctuated throughout with 100 songs from various eras and genres with “love” in their titles. The project expands Boyce’s interest in the power of music and popular culture to unite people in unexpected ways.

About Sonia Boyce:
Professor Dame Sonia Boyce (RA) works across film, drawing, photography, printmaking, sound, and installation. In 2022 she presented FEELING HER WAY, a major commission for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black British Arts Movement with her figurative pastel drawings and photocollages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, however, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a wider social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Her works are held in international museum collections including TATE, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Arts Council Collection of England, London; British Council, London; Government Art Collection, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), Paris; and Barbados Museum and Historical Society.