Lubaina Himid valuation
Turner Prize-winning painter of the overlooked lives of Black women and the African diaspora, on canvas, furniture and crockery.
Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar in 1954 and brought to Britain as a baby by her mother, a textile designer.
What a work by Lubaina Himid is worth
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Bio
Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar in 1954 and brought to Britain as a baby by her mother, a textile designer. She studied theatre design at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating in 1976, and cultural history at the Royal College of Art, and in the 1980s became one of the central figures of the Black Arts Movement in Britain, curating exhibitions of Black women artists who were then almost unseen. Her work, in painting, cut-out figures, installation and sound, retells history from the side of those written out of it — the people of the slave trade, Black women at work and at leisure, the economics of empire — often painted onto found objects, furniture, crockery and newspaper as well as canvas. A Fashionable Marriage of 1986 answers Hogarth, and Naming the Money of 2004 is an installation of a hundred cut-out figures. She won the Turner Prize in 2017, Tate Modern gave her a retrospective in 2021, and she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2026.
Her paintings on canvas are unique and often made in series, and many of her best-known installations are in museums, so what comes to market is mostly single paintings and painted objects — plates, jugs, wooden boards and furniture — with works on paper and a few editioned prints. On a painted object the object's own condition counts as much as the paint. Hollybush Gardens in London and Greene Naftali in New York represent her, and a provenance through either and the work's place in a series are what a buyer checks.
Zanzibar, Preston and the Turner Prize
When she won the Turner Prize in 2017 she was the first Black woman to do so and, at sixty-three, the oldest winner. Her British Pavilion in Venice, Predicting History: Testing Translation, was made with the sound artist Magda Stawarska.
She became Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, and in 2018 was elected a Royal Academician and made a CBE.
The Thin Black Line, Swallow Hard and Le Rodeur
Himid took her MA in cultural history at the Royal College of Art in 1984. In the early 1980s she organised three London exhibitions of young Black and Asian women artists: Black Woman Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre and Five Black Women at the Africa Centre, both in 1983, and The Thin Black Line at the ICA in 1985. Into the Open, at the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield in 1984, is regarded as the first major exhibition of the new generation of Black British artists. She was made an MBE in 2010 for services to Black women's art, and dates the change in how critics saw her work to her first show with Hollybush Gardens, in 2013.
Her series and object works include We Will Be, of 1983, in wood, paint, drawing pins, wool and collage; Revenge: A Masque in Five Tableaux, of 1991 and 1992; the Zanzibar paintings of 1999; Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, painted ceramics of 2007; Le Rodeur, a series of paintings begun in 2016; and Bittersweet, of 2022. Each figure in Naming the Money carries a label with its original African name and occupation and the ones imposed in Europe. Her work is in Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Whitworth, the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Harris in Preston.
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