[Many thanks to Veerle Poupeye (Critical.Caribbean.Art) for bringing this item to our attention.] In “Pioneering Filmmaker and Artist Isaac Julien Knighted by Queen of England,” Alex Greenberger (ARTnews) writes about Isaac Julien, a British artist and filmmaker of St. Lucian background, who was lately knighted for his ongoing work in “Range and Inclusion in Artwork.”
Isaac Julien, a filmmaker whose work has explored intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sophistication throughout the years, has grow to be one of many few Black artists to be knighted by the Queen of England.
On Thursday, the Queen revealed her 2022 Birthday Honours Record, which incorporates information of members of all sectors of British society who’ve acquired particular honors. Julien was knighted alongside the crime author Ian Rankin, and Arlene Foster, the primary minister of North Eire, was made a dame.
Among the many different art-related figures to be knighted was Nicholas Coleridge, who’s at present chairman of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In the meantime, Cornelia Parker, a sculptor with a retrospective that simply opened at Tate Britain, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Nadia Samdani, a Bangladeshi collector who ranks on the ARTnews Prime 200 Collectors record, was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Julien is amongst only a handful of Black British artists who’ve been knighted. The standing has been fraught amongst some members of their group, with the poet Benjamin Zephaniah rejecting the award in 2003 due to the phrase “empire” within the title, which he stated he related to “years of brutality.”
Since then, nonetheless, filmmaker Steve McQueen and painter Frank Bowling have each acquired the award. Each have defined that they thought of it a serious achievement as a result of they take into account being British to be a core part of their respective identities.
Over time, Julien has grow to be broadly identified internationally for his technically advanced multiscreen installations which have drawn closely on the theories of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Corridor, and others. Early on, he gained recognition for his movies and movies about his id as a Black homosexual man from London. Since then, he has turned his focus world, coaching his digital camera on recreations of Frederick Douglass’s life and a visions supposed to evoke a 2004 flood that killed 20 Chinese language cockle pickers in England.
Seemingly in recognition of the intersectional qualities of Julien’s work, the Queen’s Birthday Honours Record famous that Julien had acquired his knighthood for “Range and Inclusion in Artwork.”
[Photo above: Tilda Swinton and Isaac Julien. PHOTO BY JOERG CARSTENSEN/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES.]
For full article, see https://www.artnews.com/art-news/information/isaac-julien-knighted-cornelia-parker-queens-birthday-honours-1234630626/