Yinka Shonibare CBE: Moving Up: Meridians | Art Basel Miami Beach

30 November - 4 December, 2021

  • Yinka Shonibare’s installation Moving Up (2021) is about the Great Migration – the exodus of six million Black Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West from 1916 to 1970. The work consists of three figures carrying their worldly possessions in bags, suitcases, and nets as they climb a grand staircase, a metaphor for their upward movement geographically, economically, and socially. Each figure dons 19th-century attire in the artist’s signature Dutch Wax fabric, which symbolizes the contradictions and complexities of cultural origins. These period costumes allude to the Victorian Era, when the foundations of the sharecropping system and Jim Crow – the instruments of suppression for Black Americans in the South – were laid.

  • "Moving Up captures the bravery of migrating Black Americans seeking a new place within the public life in the cities of the North and West. While the migration resulted from inhumane living conditions, structural racism, and labour exploitation, it brought forth a new era of African-American self-assertion within American society. The persistence, endurance, and dedication of this generation shaped the contemporary American social, economic, and cultural landscape." - Yinka Shonibare CBE

  • ABOUT THE ARTIST

    ABOUT THE ARTIST

    Yinka Shonibare CBE RA was born in London in 1962 and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to the UK to study Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London and Goldsmiths College, London, where he received his Master’s in Fine Art.

     

    Shonibare is a member of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation who first came to prominence in the late 1990s. Shonibare’s The British Library was recently acquired by the Tate London, where it remains on long term display. In recent years, Shonibare has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria (2021); M WOODS, Beijing, China (2020); Arts House, Singapore (2020); and many more. 

     

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