Mirror Reflecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive
Goldsmiths Press, 2021
From the Bronx to Soho to Brixton, Mirror Reflecting Darkly is an exploration of the artist Rita Keegan's archive collection. Part biography and part critical history, it reproduces a cross-section of Keegan's archive, mapping an artistic practice that spans exhibitions at major institutions to pioneering community arts initiatives to her curatorship of the Women of Colour Index, a groundbreaking 1987 initiative that documented the work of Black and Asian women artists. The book includes records of Keegan's journey through the divergent creative environments of London in the 1980s and 1990s, offering rare ephemera drawn from her long involvement in the British Black Arts Movement, her years as a fixture of Soho clubland, as well as the intimate documentary traces of her everyday life as a working Black female artist.
Contributors
Barby Asante, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Janice Cheddie, Lauren Craig, Lucy Davies, Althea Greenan, Joy Gregory, Hiroko Hagiwara, Matthew Harle, Rita Keegan, Shaheen Merali, Naomi Pearce.
Part of the Rita Keegan Archive Project
Exhibition
Exhibition at South London Gallery