Donald Locke

The work is titled after the name of a plantation in the artist’s native Guyana, Dageraad, which in 1763 was the site of Guyana’s first slave rebellion. Dageraad From the Air is one of approximately six black monochrome paintings, executed between 1976 and 1979, that are among the last body of work executed by the artist in London before moving to the United States in 1979. They build on the subject explored in his ‘Plantation Series’ of approximately five unique sculptures of similar size, of which Plantation K-140 1974 is in Tate’s collection (Tate T15768). Works addressing the theme of plantations occupied Locke from 1972 to 1979 and he considered them one of his most important body of works. They are sculptural and painterly metaphors for the corrosive plantation system of labour, wealth, social structure and division of the land that shaped the history of Guyana (then British Guiana) under Dutch and later British colonial rule.

The village where Locke was born and grew up, Stewartville, was built on a narrow strip of land, wedged between two sugar cane plantations. Personal memories and historical associations are evoked in his ‘Plantation Series’ works. The artist has stated: ‘In the Caribbean, the most dominant sociological event is the plantation system. I grew up at a time when the plantation system was still in existence. It dominated the sky; it dominated your life from beginning to end.’ (Quoted in Hay 1989, p.40.) He went on to discuss the works in the series as ‘metaphors where forms are held in strict lines, connected together as if with chains held within a system of metal bars or metal grids analogous to the system whereby one group of people were kept in economic and political subjugation by another group’ (in Hay 1989, p.40).

Dageraad From the Air is exemplary of the way in which Locke combined traditional art mediums and everyday found materials. In an artist’s statement written in 2004, he referred to this approach as emerging from the background of ‘Creole’ America’, in an attempt to portray the experience of Black people (Locke 2004, accessed 28 October 2019). This statement points to the fact that the range of different materials and stylistic approaches he adopted, and the different themes he explored in his work, can be discussed in terms of the hybridity and plurality of Black culture across the Americas and in terms of the contribution of different cultural strands, particularly the African component, to the plural character of modernity. Writing in the exhibition catalogue for the landmark exhibition The Other Story held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1989, artist and curator Rasheed Araeen (born 1935) stated that Locke’s work ‘scans his own history as well as that of Modernism’, as ‘it was not merely a question of recovering one’s history but also re-inscribing it in the discourse of a dominant culture’ (Rasheed Araeen, ‘Donald Locke’, in The Other Story, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London 1989, p.92–3). Dageraad From the Air was exhibited in The Other Story alongside two other monochrome black paintings from the sequence.

Further reading
Vicky Hay, ‘The Multifaceted Donald Locke’, Smithsonian Institution’s American Visions, October 1989, pp.37–40.
Donald Locke, ‘Artist’s Statement’, Atlanta, April 2004, included in the press release for his solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery, New York, 2004, https://www.skotogallery.com/viewer/home/donald.locke.release.asd, accessed 28 October 2019.
Donald Locke, Out of Anarchy: Five Decades of Ceramics and Hybrid Sculptures (1959–2009): The Work of Donald Locke, Newark, New Jersey 2010.

Elena Crippa
July 2020