Step into the unknown, Soho Road

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 100 Parliament Street

Vanley Burke was born in St Thomas Parish, Jamaica, in 1951. He moved to the UK in 1965, joining his mother in Handsworth, Birmingham, where he immediately began capturing the lives of the community surrounding him. ‘I remember realising that all history had to start somewhere and that we were at a unique stage in history in this country,’ he has since reflected. Burke’s first major solo exhibition, Handsworth from the Inside, was held at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and toured to the Commonwealth Institute in London, in 1983. Recent shows at Ikon include At Home with Vanley Burke in 2015, which displayed the contents of the artist’s flat, and A Gift to Birmingham in 2022/23. Blood & Fire: Our Journey Through Vanley Burke’s History at Soho House Museum in 2022 was co-curated by the artist and curators Candice Nembhard and Paul Goodwin. The Vanley Burke Archive of material related to Britain’s Black communities is deposited at Birmingham Archives and Heritage.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Vanley Burke (1951 - )

Title

Step into the unknown, Soho Road

Date

1983

Medium

Silver gelatin print

Dimensions

height: 30.5 cm; width: 40.6 cm

Provenance

Purchased from the Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND), March 2023

GAC number

19185