Donald Locke

In 1992, when then 61-year-old Donald Locke (b. Guyana, 1930-2010) artist, teacher, critic, and poet, moved into his new brick-wall warehouse studio space at Nexus, the grassroots artists’ cooperative that would later become Atlanta Contemporary, he remarked, “I feel that this is the beginning, the nucleus of something.” 

Honoring Locke’s penchant for the literary, the poetically abstract, and the unknowable, the exhibition Donald Locke: Nexus engages the multiple meanings of “nexus”—to bind tie, connect—to reveal a practice shaped by the intersection of ideas, mediums, temporalities, and geographies. The exhibition gathers seminal works that span the artist’s dynamic 50-year career. Placing works made during Locke’s time at Nexus and in Atlanta, a prolific last chapter in his oeuvre as a center point, the exhibition explores how this time and space served as a “nucleus of something.” Linking these works to the artist’s journey across Guyana, United Kingdom, and United States, the exhibition probes the ways in which a pursuit of nexus permeated Locke’s work in both tangible and symbolic ways.

Donald Locke: Nexus is curated by Grace Aneiza Ali with support from Brenda Locke, the Locke Family, and the Donald Locke Estate.