Department

Art History

Date

5-2019

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Art History (M.A.)

Type of Paper/Work

Qualifying paper

Advisor

Heather M. Shirey

Second Advisor

Elizabeth Kindall

Third Advisor

Jayme Yahr

Abstract

Boyce is one of the most celebrated black female British artists in the UK. Collected by the Tate at age 25 and honored by the Queen twice, she has been heralded in the art world but her oeuvre has seldom, if ever, been surveyed for its visual similarities. When examining British artist Sonia Boyce’s career, her art is often siloed between her pre-1990 drawings and collage work and her post-1990 collaborative years. Although Boyce’s art has taken on a variety of forms and integrated a range of materials, her use of wallpaper as a visual tool has spanned these
differences. I argue that Boyce regularly employs wallpaper to articulate identity in relation to the concepts of double-consciousness and entanglement. My paper expands on the carefully considered role of wallpaper as it applies to four works which span Boyce’s oeuvre, two works from Boyce’s early drawings and two of her contemporary collaborative pieces.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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