Joy Labinjo

One of my favorite Joy Labinjo works features two men standing side by side, both in suits,  framed by orange into rectangular blue boxes and presented in the trappings of some sort of magic show. On the left, a white man stands with his arms crossed, frowning at the viewer, eyes squinted and brows deeply furrowed. On the right, a Black man in a bow-tie points to five playing cards arranged in his left hand. A big smile lights up his face in surprise. The work is titled Playing the Race Card. When I saw it, I literally spit out my drink. 

 

Yes, we’re all a bit fatigued by 2020 topics, but unequivocally still reeling from the profound changes unleashed. For Labinjo, whose work was included in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition while juggling multiple gallery shows, this awakened a renewed focus. A break-out star with captivating portraits of Black families from her own photo albums, she hit the emergency break, made a three-point turn, and let velocity do the rest.

 

Labinjo’s newer works are fucking bold. And I’d apologize for my language, but I mean it sincerely. The work is unflinching, as it confronts Britain’s racist history in contemporary moments of white bigotry. But it’s also quite cheeky. Labinjo is clever, utilizing humor within her work to address painful stories, in the hopes that the sting, as she says, “will sting a little less.” Lately, with commissions, one at the Brixton Underground and another on the Becontree Estate, her work finds a joyful harmony. The colorful, sculptural figures that are signature to her genius shimmer in soft memories, the ones placed floating right in the back of your eyelids.

 

There comes a point where every Black artist has the same thought process. Do I want my art to be defined by my identity? Can’t I just be an artist without categorization or definition? Why do these classifications exist in the first place? Who actually gets to play the “race card?” 

 

If you look closely, the man in Playing the Race Card is holding a royal flush in a suit of hearts. I’ll let you decide what that means for yourself.

Joy Labinjo: Ha ha! Umm…wow… taking care of myself… Well, I actually went on holiday last week. It was nice to be horizontal and feel relaxed. And I was thinking of starting massages again, but Covid’s back. Well, it never really went, but everyone has it now, so probably not. I'm just trying to enjoy the studio process and not saying yes to anything I don't want to do.

 

It’s hard, it's hard. And you'll often be perceived as selfish, but yeah. Number one first.

 

Egypt! So I had some fun, which is nice. And I didn't realize I hadn't been on holiday for such a long time. It's always taking a plane for work and you just call it a holiday, but it’s, like, no! That’s not a holiday!

 

Wow! That's a big question! With painting people the way they look, it’s kind of just instinctive. For a long time, I was looking at other artists and how they paint, and it took me a while to figure out how I paint. But now, whatever I paint still has that form and structure. And as I’ve gone on, I've enhanced it with special brushes. So I normally use angled brushes and black brushes, because I find it easier to paint how I see the figure with those brushes. But the collage effect—I mean, I say collage, basically just lifting things from different sources and fusing them together to make something new, for me, is just how my brain has always worked. Like at school with class projects, I'd use things I'd learned in history to help with another subject. And that's just how I've always processed things.

 

Yeah, with links in different places. And yeah, lifting things from different sources. So right now in some work I'm lifting things from Gainsborough, Hogarth… Instagram and kind of just fusing them together. I feel like lots of people work like this, but they just don't necessarily recognize where everything comes from.

 

A bit of both, but normally, once I begin painting. Sometimes I feel like I need help in the studio, but because my work isn’t planned out before, I don't know how I'd bring someone else in. As soon as I get going, it's quite fast and hard to explain. It's just kind of easier for me if I just get on with it, and normally, one thing leads into another. But, for the body of work, I might have an idea or a subject matter. Then the actual composition of the paintings just kind of comes.

 

They’re done! Haha! I mean, there might be a couple more at home, but I was really running out, which is why I expanded to archives. Like archives of Black figures from the 1980s and beyond. I mean, if I still really wanted to do a family photo, I could use the albums my extended family has. But I just felt like… the act of painting was fun, but it was becoming formulaic and not that exciting to me anymore. However, it really was a gateway into learning how to paint figures and pattern. Learning composition and just finding out what I was interested in. It was a really good springboard. 

Both. It was a mixture of things. The phrase, “I don't see color,” I don't know about America, but it's something British people say.

 

Yeah, white people say this all the time. So it's something I've heard throughout my life. And reading Facebook comments inspired a lot of that body of work because… ha ha, I feel like in our actual lives, the people we're surrounded by are normally those who reflect our own views. But for me, Facebook is leftover people from so many different parts of my life, where I feel like I can get the truth of what the rest of the country is thinking. And the gaps of knowledge!

I had to write a post—well, I didn't have to—but I wrote a post explaining what “privilege” means. And then it was reflecting my general life and just the wider discussion at the time. Like listening to the radio, “I don't see color.” It was something that was being said all the time. And I think it's just ridiculous.

 

Yeah! When I was thinking about these paintings and racism as a whole… Let me find the words… I mean, up until that point, I painted mainly Black figures. And I feel like so often when we talk about racism and race, we speak about our hurt, but we never really condemn white people or include them in the narrative. You know, racism doesn't really work without white people. So I really wanted to do something so white people could see themselves, and humor was my way of maybe making the sting… sting a little less. Ha ha!

I didn’t hear anything! I mean, I think it's something they discuss amongst themselves. But when I was making that body of work—I mean, I don't make my work for the money, but obviously I do hope that they sell so that I can make more work and keep going. So, at that stage, I was really terrified about what the reception would be and whether they would sell. And I know that a lot of people who buy my work are white, which is why I wanted to make that work even more. Like it's not enough for you to maybe feel like you're absolving yourself by buying pretty paintings of Black people. 

 

Yeah, it's really interesting… “Terrible, Isn't it?” hasn't sold. Ha ha! It was first hung in an art fair environment, which, I mean, I didn't think it was ever really necessarily going to do what it was supposed to do in that space. But it is on show now. And yeah, I'll be interested to know what viewers have made of it. Ha ha! I'm glad you find them funny!

 

Sure. So I started making two. One was similar to my early work, like a family in a living room, maybe set in the ’80s and ’90s. It was painted to look like a family but the people all came from different sources. I guess it was just a multi-generational Black family gathering in the living room. And then I was going to have posters on the wall of political figures from Brixton. I was thinking about the Brixton riots and the Windrush generation. 

 

Then, on the other side of my studio, I started the salon piece because I always wanted to paint a salon, and I haven't seen a salon painted by a Black female artist. It was always something that I'd wanted to do, but I wasn't sure if it was powerful enough. So, at a certain point, I actually worked on the family scene a lot more than the salon scene. Then a friend came to the studio and pointed to the salon scene and said, “That's Brixton.” As I was painting the family scene, it just felt like something I’d done so many times before, so after my friends came, I went with the salon.

Yes! I was at the salon a couple of weeks ago to get braids done. And the lady called the hairdresser and said she'd be five minutes… she took 15 minutes to come. And then she said she's just “doing someone else's hair and will come back in 15 minutes.” An hour and a half later she came! And I was angry but… I still wanted her to do my hair. You know? 

 

Really happy! It was important to me to do something that gave back to my community in Brixton. Brixton has been through so much. Like gentrification, poverty, class divide. And yeah, these hairdressers are still standing through all of this. And they're such interesting places. It was always something definitely for Black women. I feel like Black men can resonate as well. But yeah, really important.

 

In one word, I will say history. In the sense that I'm researching and reading a lot, and looking to the past to make the work I’m making now. But it's still feeding on some of the things we've already discussed. So basically, when George Floyd was killed, and I was going through Facebook comments and just every day reading an article posted for bait, and I began to realize how little people know about British history, how Black people came to be in Britain, or even what Britain did to the rest of the world. So I'm looking at Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. They helped to abolish slavery. But I was also just thinking about general education and the many rules in place that the general public isn’t privy to about what teachers are allowed to teach and how the curriculum is configured. 

 

Basically, if I think back to history lessons, the things I remember learning about the most are World War One and World War Two. And from that angle, learning about how bad Germany was. We weren't taught any history where Britain did anything wrong. Slavery was kind of just brushed over. We learn about the Industrial Revolution that took place but not about how sugar, and herbs, and traded things, and the effect of the slave trade made it possible. History, they really chopped it up to show the best bits. So there are a lot of adults who just don’t know. I mean, racism is unfounded anyway, but I just feel like if they knew some of these things, they might perceive Black people, Asian people, people of color collectively, so differently. So I'm making work about that at the moment. 

 

I just hope that the paintings serve as an introduction to these figures. Perhaps making people curious enough to go and look them up. I think that's what art can do. At least, that's what I'm trying to do.