Greene Naftali is pleased to announce Street Sellers, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Lubaina Himid. A pioneer of the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, Himid is among the most celebrated British artists working today. Her expansive painting practice operates in the gaps of the historical record, lending lush visibility to issues of labor, migration, and the human toll of empire.

Himid’s latest cycle of paintings affirms the dignity of work through depictions of vendors who ply their wares, elegantly dressed and equipped with the tools of their particular trade. The figures emerge from a rich blend of temporalities and points of reference: from the hawkers that remain street-level fixtures of urban life, to popular prints of merchants and peddlers dating back to 17th-century London as rare documents of the working class. The genre of the full-length portrait—linked to aristocrats and monarchs—is also recast with new protagonists, shown on a grand scale and fully at one with their respective métiers. Asserting the centrality of Black subjects to art historical arenas long denied them, Himid frees herself to invent what the archive lacks: “I paint it into existence.

More information can be found here.