(1949 - )
Rita Keegan was born in New York and is of Caribbean and Canadian descent. She trained as a painter at San Francisco Art Institute from 1969 to 1972 before migrating to the UK in 1980. A key and overlooked figure in the history of Black British art, in 1983, following the aftermath of the Brixton riots, Rita Keegan helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery where she curated the first exhibition by the Black Women Artists collective. In 1984, she co-founded CopyArt, a resource for community groups and artists working with computers, scanners and photocopiers, funded by a grant from the Greater London Council. Keegan was also a staff member at the Women Artists Slide Library from 1985 to 1990, where she established the Women of Colour Index – a catalogue of slides recording the work of Black women artists.
Throughout this period she continued to make work which was an intersection of new media experimentation, feminist practice and the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. Rita Keegan's work was widely exhibited during the 1980s and 1990s. Group exhibitions included Trophies of Empire at the Bluecoat, curated by Keith Piper (1992); Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996 at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1996); Family Histories at 198 (1998). In 2021, Keegan had her first solo exhibition in more than 15 years at South London Gallery.
