Hew Locke: Passages

Hew Locke: Passages includes over 40 works spanning more than three decades of Locke’s career in media ranging from drawing and photography to sculpture. Through his works, Locke, who is of Guyanese and British heritage, invites viewers to examine how cultures shape their identities through visual symbols of authority, what those symbols meant historically, and how they’re interpreted today.

Locke makes his multilayered sculptures and assemblages from traditional art materials and collections of objects, including beads, sequins, toys, coins, souvenirs, and more. They combine objects from different periods of time and influences from the Caribbean to Europe to Asia. Drawing from his own upbringing, perspective, and appreciation of the Baroque, with its formal and conceptual complexity, Locke creates works that “take us on a journey into his vision of the world—dazzling, seductive, poignant, and sinister all at once,” explains Martina Droth, who curated Locke’s exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, where she serves as the Paul Mellon Director.

From the moment visitors enter the galleries, they will experience Locke’s ornamental language, which includes symbols of nation and empire and the global movement of wealth, peoples, and cultures. These include ships and boats, figurative and equestrian monuments, architectural forms, money and stocks, and the clothing and emblems of royalty. Viewers will gain a heightened sense of the complexities of history and the meanings and status associated with materials and visual symbols. They will leave with an invitation to examine, question, and even reimagine the icons of state power we encounter every day.