Pearl Alcock
Pearl Alcock (1934 Jamaica – 2006, London, England)[1] was a club owner and artist, best known as a British outsider artist.
Life and work
Alcock moved to London from Jamaica in her twenties, abandoning her marriage in Jamaica.[2] First finding work as a maid, by the 1970s she had opened a dress shop on Railton Road in Brixton[3] and later ran a cafe[4] and an illegal shebeen, popular with the local gay community,on the same street.[5] She herself was known to be bisexual.[5][6] Following the 1985 Brixton uprising both her shop and bar failed and she found herself on the dole and unable to afford a birthday card for a friend so she drew one.[3] Alcock described this realization of her knack for drawing: “I went mad scribbling on anything I laid my hands on,”she explains, “friends admired what I had done and began to bring me materials to use, that is how I started.”[2]
Monika Kinley, one of the country's leading advocates of Outsider Art, describes her as "a visual poet".[7] In 2005 her work was included in Tate Britain's first exhibition of art shown under the term Outsider Art.[8]
In spite of her high regard in the context of Outsider Art, Pearl Alcock's work has been offered at auction multiple times and only one artwork has sold; this was "Thukela (Tugela) River", which realized $294 USD at Germann Auctions in 2012.
Selected exhibitions
- 2005: Outsider Art, Tate Britain, London [9]
- 1989: Three Brixton Artists: Pearl Alcock, George Kelly, Michael Ross, 198 Gallery, London[10]
The Brixton LGBTQ Community
Alcock’s possession of a shebeen retained an unprecedentedly important place in the Brixton LGBTQ scene for the time. A white British man named Simon recalled the place as a hub of interaction for both the local LGBTQ black and white populations:
“Always heaving...a space this sort of size packed with people dancing, and there would be a bar at the end selling Heineken or cocktail type stuff, martinis and so on...there were only one or two women there, about 80 % black men, 20 % white I suppose. Of the black guys that would go to Pearl’s...maybe half of them would be in a relationship with a white person, and half would be in a relationship with a black person.”[5]
References
- ^ "Pearl Alcock". artprice.com. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
- ^ a b "Outsider Art: Exhibition guide: Biographies". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 21 September 2015.
- ^ a b Kurlansky, Mark (1992). A Continent of Islands: a searching for the Caribbean destiny. Addison-Weasley Publishing. pp. 236–238. ISBN 0201523965.
- ^ Hilton, Tim (30 August 1989). "A Breath of Eire". The Guardian.
- ^ a b c Cook, Matt (2014). "Capital Stories: Local Lives in Queer London". In Evans, Jennifer V.; Cook, Matt (eds.). Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 47. ISBN 144114840X. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
- ^ England, Historic. "Communities of Resistance | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk. Retrieved 2019-03-22.
- ^ Steward, Sue (29 October 2000). "Outsider dealing". The Observer. London, UK. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
- ^ "Outsider Art, Exhibition Guide, Biographies". Tate Britain. 2005. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
- ^ "Outsider Art, Tate Britain". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 22 November 2015.
- ^ Three Brixton Artists: Pearl Alcock, George Kelly, Michael Ross. 1989.
Further reading
- Kinley, Monika. "Monika's Story: A Personal History of the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection". Musgrave Kinley Outsider Trust, 2005
External links
- 1934 births
- 2006 deaths
- Black English people
- English people of Jamaican descent
- Outsider artists
- Black British artists
- Jamaican women artists
- British artists
- LGBT history in the United Kingdom
- People from Brixton
- Women outsider artists
- Black English women
- 20th-century British women artists
- Jamaican artists
- Bisexual women