Author Description

Documenting the artistic practice of Rita Keegan: from exhibitions at major venues to everyday life as a working Black female artist. From the Bronx to Soho to Brixton, Mirror Reflecting Darkly is an exploration of the artist Rita Keegan's archive collection. Part autobiography and part critical history, it reproduces a cross-section of Keegan's archive, mapping an artistic practice that ranges from her exhibitions at such major museums and galleries as the ICA and the Tate to her curatorship of the Women of Colour Index, a groundbreaking 1987 initiative that documented Black and Asian women artists. It includes records of Keegan's journey through different creative environments of London in the 1980s and 1990s, offering rare ephemera drawn from her involvement in the Black British Art movement, covering her years as a fixture of Soho clubland, and documenting the intimate traces of her everyday life as a working Black female artist. Accompanying the selections from the archive are essays and personal reflections from a range of writers, academics, and artists--including Keegan herself--which expand upon the themes from the material: networks of creative kinship, the story of British Black Arts, self-archiving, and archiving as activism. 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