Fondation

Sonia Boyce DBE RA (b. London, 1962) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, 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 British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, however, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference.

In 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in 2023, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in Boston. Since graduating in the early 1980s, Boyce has consistently worked within the art school context. In 2014, she became a professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art and Design. A three-year research project into Black Artists and Modernism culminated with a 2018 BBC documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History, exploring the contribution of overlooked artists of African and Asian descent to the story of modern British art. In the King’s New Year Honours List of 2024, Boyce was awarded a Damehood.

Her work is in many UK and international museum collections including Tate, London; Victoria and 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; and Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), Paris.

Rajni Perera was born in Sri Lanka in 1985 and lives and works in Toronto. Perera seeks to open and reveal the dynamism of the icons, beings, and objects she creates by means of a subversive aesthetic that counteracts antiquated, oppressive discourse, and acts as a restorative force. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the McMichael Gallery, PHI Foundation (Montréal), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Toronto), The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), Colomboscope (Sri Lanka), and Eastside Projects (UK) among others. She is in numerous collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, the McMicheal Canadian Art Collection, and the Sobey Foundation. She was awarded the Sauer Art Prize at the Armory Show in 2023, was the recipient of the MOCA Toronto Award in 2022, and was the Ontario region finalist for the Sobey Art Award in 2021.

Marigold Santos was born in the Philippines, and immigrated with her family to Canada in 1988. She pursues an interdisciplinary art practice that examines notions of heritage, folklore, motherwork, and decolonization presented within the otherworldly. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tattoo work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation, and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada.