Yinka Shonibare Mbe

BIOGRAPHY INFORMATION

Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in 1962 in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study art first at Central Saint Martins College and then at Goldsmiths, where he received his master’s in fine arts. Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the media of painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Shonibare was a Turner Prize nominee in 2004 and was also awarded the decoration of Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, or MBE.

He was commissioned by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta in 2002 to create Gallantry and Criminal Conversation, the work that launched him on the international stage. His Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was displayed in London’s Trafalgar Square. It was the first such commission by a black British artist and was part of a national fundraising campaign organized by the Art Fund and the National Maritime Museum; it is now permanently displayed outside the museum’s new entrance in London. In 2012, the Royal Opera House commissioned his Globe Head Ballerina. The life-sized ballerina encased within a giant snow globe spins slowly as if caught mid-dance. Shonibare’s works are also included in prominent museums, including the Tate in London, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and the VandenBroek Foundation in the Netherlands.

Literature

/ FABRICA-TION, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Yorkshire, UK (includes an interview by Hans
Ulrich Obrist)
/ Artwriting, Nation and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The ‘Englishness’ of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century, edited by Mark A. Cheetham, Ashgate, Surrey, UK
/ I Know Something About Love, Yinka Shonibare (text contribution), Parasol Unit, Koenig Books, London, England
/ Looking Up, Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Monaco
/ Before and After Modernism, Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London
/ KulTur i Afrika, The Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden
/ Pattern ID, Ellen Rudolph, Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio, USA
/ Yinka Shonibare, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
/ Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Odile and Odette, published by ACA Gallery of SCAD, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
/ Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Rachel Kent and Robert Hobbs, Prestel and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Australia
/ Jardin d’amour, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, FranceFashion Accidently, edited by Hsiangling Lai and Iris Huang, Contemporary Art Foundation / Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
/ RADAR: Selections from the Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, Denver Art Museum
/ Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, Phaidon Press
/ Acting the Part: Photography as Theatre, National Gallery of Canada, Merrell, London
/ Contemporary Commonwealth, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
/ Around the World in Eighty Days, edited by Claire Fitzsimmons, Kit Hammonds, Margot Heller and Jens Hoffman, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and South London Gallery
/ Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History, edited by Nato Thompson, published byMassachusets Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusets
/ Acting Out: The Invented Melodrama in Contemporary Photography, essay by Kathleen
/ Edwards, University of Washington Press, Seattle
/ Zürich Development Center, Zürich Insurance Company, Zürich, Switzerland
/ Shades of Black, Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, Duke University Press, Durham, NC; inIVA, London
/ A Sense of Place, inIVA, London
/ Exploring Art. A Global, Thematic Approach, Thomson Wadsworth, USA
/ Africa Remix, Contemporary Art of a Continent, Hayward Gallery, London
/ Samtidskonst för lävare och andra intresserade, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
/ The Israel Museum Jerusalem, Harry N. Abrams Inc. New York
/ L’art de la friche, essai sur l’art africain contemporain, Flammarion, France
/ Turner Prize, Tate, London
/ Undomesticated Interiors, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, MA
/ Fashination, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
/ Selvedge…The Fabric of Your Life; The Architecture Issue, London
/ The Culture Game, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, MN
/ Continental Drift, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, FL
/ Double Dutch, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands and Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria
/ Doublures, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
/ Looking Both Ways-Art of the African Diaspora, edited by Laurie Ann Farrell, published by the Museum for African Art, Long Island City, Queens, New York
/ Attitude, Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Japan
/ Double Dress, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
/ Yinka Shonibare, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
/ Unpacking Europe, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
/ Yinka Shonibare. Be-Muse, Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen, Rome, Italy
/ Enwezor, Okwui, Tricking the Mind: the work of Yinka Shonibare, in Authentic/Eccentric
/ Conceptualism in African Art, 49th Venice Biennale, Italy
/ Yinka Shonibare, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
/ Vantage Point, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
/ Bo01 City of Tomorrow, European Housing Expo, Malmo, Sweden
/ The Short Century, Museum Villa Stuck, München, Germany
/ Camouflage, Centre of Contemporary Art of Southern Africa, Johannesburg
/ Give and Take, Serpentine Gallery, London
/ Bamgboyé, O. A. What is Print?, in Technology and Culture, Witte de With Center For Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands