Her inscription read Brown Sugar (2017)

Jade Montserrat’s practice is research-led, excavating shared histories alongside delving into her personal narrative. She works across artistic media: in painting, drawing, film, performance, installation, sculpture, text and print. Much of her work focuses on the entertainer and civil-rights activist Josephine Baker (1906-1975) whose story represents the intersection of gender, race, class and celebrity culture that fascinates Montserrat.

In the 1920s, Baker performed at the Folies Bergère, became the first Black woman to star in a feature film and later joined the French Resistance. In later life, she became a figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Baker’s extraordinary life is the basis for Montserrat’s Rainbow Tribe series. It references a period in Baker’s later life when she adopted 12 children of different ethnicities and religions as the embodiment of her vision of a world without racism. Taking this fairy-tale like idea as inspiration, Montserrat explores contemporary issues of diversity, belonging and movement examining our globalised world through the lens of Baker’s flawed experiment.

Of the nine works acquired for York, three are depictions of the artist’s own torso emblazoned with symbols and patterns, while four are text pieces that make direct reference to the body. Both of these sets relate to Monserrat’s experience of growing up in North Yorkshire. The other two works share synergies between both of the former groups, showing crouching bodies embellished with intricate script.

Montserrat’s work is strongly aligned with the permanent collections at York Art Gallery, particularly in relation to the collecting strategy initiated in 2012 that takes inspiration from York-born Georgian artist William Etty, a lifelong advocate of the nude. Major works such as Quadrille (1974) by Rose English and Ego Geometria Sum IV: Boat, age 2 years (1983) by Helen Chadwick have been acquired as part of this initiative, which aims to build a contemporary art collection that deals with issues surrounding the human body. Fittingly, Jade Montserrat’s works on paper have now joined this growing collection of self-portraits by remarkable women artists.

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