Finding Ourselves in Art: A Conversation with Lubaina Himid
On the transformative power of representation, empathy, and the questions we should be asking
There's something magical that happens when you sit down with an artist and really listen. I went into my conversation with Lubaina Himid as a fan, but I left as something more—someone who finally understood not just what she creates, but why her work matters so profoundly.
As someone who has navigated the in-between spaces of identity myself—leaving the UK as a child, returning with an accent that can't quite decide where it belongs—I found myself drawn to Himid's exploration of displaced culture. Her work speaks to that particular experience of being British and Zanzibari, of existing in multiple worlds simultaneously, of creating art that bridges these spaces with extraordinary grace.
The Search for Ourselves
"When I was a teenager going to museums and galleries with my mother," Himid tells me, settling into what becomes the heart of our conversation, "if you go to any of those big art galleries like the Tate or National Gallery, the only time I could see myself was..." She pauses, and in that pause lives decades of searching. "Where were we in the history of culture? Where were we in the history of art? I found that I was always looking for our lives and our stories and our faces."
This is where Himid's work begins—not with technique or tradition, but with absence. With the radical act of looking for yourself in spaces that weren't built to reflect you back.
When she says her paintings need to be places where "you can see yourself," she doesn't mean literal self-portraits. She means something far more complex and necessary: the creation of space for stories that have been systematically excluded from the gallery walls.
The Weight of Empathy
What strikes me most about Himid's approach is how she describes her process: "I try to understand what that must have felt like, so I can paint the feeling of what it must have felt like rather than the picture of what it was like."
This distinction—between depicting and feeling—gets to something essential about her work. Take "Old Boat, New Money," with its haunting hull-like forms that lean against gallery walls like the skeleton of something we can barely comprehend. It's not a historical illustration; it's an emotional archaeology, an attempt to excavate and honor feelings that history tried to bury.
"Sometimes it isn't all about the slave trade," she notes, acknowledging the weight that often gets placed on her work. But there's something larger at play here—what I can only describe as a giant, painful empathy that runs through everything she creates. It's the only way, she believes, "that I can make work that changes anything at all."
The Democracy of Objects
Walking through Himid's exhibition space, you're surrounded by the familiar made strange: oars mounted on walls, drawing tables, drawers, doors, wardrobes. These aren't props, exactly, though her connection to theater runs deep. They're something more intimate.
"I have a relationship with drawers that is really intimate and obvious and not something I consider," she admits with a laugh. But then she gets serious: "Almost everybody that comes to see the work has opened a door and opened a drawer in their lifetime. Children even climb in them, some people sleep in them."
This is the genius of her material choices—she works with objects that carry our collective muscle memory. When she points to half-doors that were salvaged from a builder's skip, painted over years and cut in half to make space for more refuse, there's poetry in the dysfunction. "All the objects in this show are mildly dysfunctional," she explains. These rescued, repurposed materials become vessels for stories about displacement, about lives lived in transit, about the ghosts of people who engaged with "even fine furniture in fine houses."
The Aunties
Perhaps nothing captures Himid's evolution as an artist quite like her "Aunties" series—64 painted planks that represent women who aren't blood relatives but occupy essential spaces in our lives. "Auntie is a kind of big word," she explains. "Globally, auntie sort of means woman who is around... in our house, chatting or scheming or strategizing."
The leap from seeking representation in museums to creating these abstract female figures as planks of wood represents what she calls "total freedom." It's a stunning evolution: the girl who couldn't see herself in art galleries grew up to create works where planks can be stand-ins for women, where the most essential human relationships can be distilled into painted wood grouped in conversations of sevens, twelves, or fives.
The Questions We're Not Asking
"Bizarrely, hardly anyone asks me about the making," Himid tells me when I ask what question she wishes people would pose. "They ask me about the politics, they ask me about the life, they ask me about the strategy, but not many people ask me about the making, the actual stuff of the stuff I use or the colors I use or whether I use brushes or how much time I spend thinking about it."
This oversight speaks to something profound about how we consume art by artists from marginalized communities. We're so focused on the biographical and political dimensions that we miss the craft, the technique, the pure artistry. We reduce complex creative practices to identity markers, missing the forest for the very important but not complete trees.
Standing before a large charcoal drawing—a study for a tiled wall that exists only in possibility—I'm struck by how Himid's hand is visible in ways that feel urgent, immediate. It's a reminder that before politics, before biography, before theory, there's the simple, revolutionary act of mark-making.
The Point of It All
When I ask Himid about the purpose of art, she leans into something beautiful: "It shows you that anything is possible." Art, she believes, is proof that something can emerge from nothing, that dreams—which are free—can become tangible realities that affect us in ways we never thought possible.
"Dreams are free," she says, and in that simple statement lies both the accessibility and the power of imagination. Art allows us to bring our lives to something because artists bring their lives—"what they like to eat and what music they like to listen to and who they fell in love with"—to the things they make.
What We Miss
After forty years of making art, thirty years of teaching, and only the last eleven years of gallery representation, Himid has learned something crucial: we don't need the answers. We need the questions. The right questions.
Her work doesn't offer easy solutions or simple narratives. Instead, it creates space for the kind of complex, nuanced conversations that happen between aunties, around tables, in the spaces between cultures. It shows us that an oar can be both a functional object and a canvas for shells that conjure entire histories of displacement and survival.
The privilege of sitting with an artist and really listening is that you leave understanding not just what they've made, but why they had to make it. Himid's work isn't just about representation—though that matters enormously. It's about the patient, persistent work of feeling your way into histories that were never properly recorded, of creating space for conversations that should have been happening all along.
Her work asks us to consider not just what we see, but what we've been trained not to see. Not just whose stories get told, but whose stories we're ready to hear. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that the questions we ask—about art, about history, about each other—matter as much as any answers we might find.
The work is there, waiting. The question is whether we're ready to ask about the making as much as the meaning.