Artists

Rita Keegan, OBE, was born Rita Morrison in the Bronx, New York, in 1949, to a Dominican mother and Black Canadian father. She studied illustration and costume design at the High School of Art and Design in New York before earning a fine arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute (1969–1972), where her teachers included photographer Imogen Cunningham and African-American artist Mary O'Neill. Keegan moved to London in the late 1970s, where she has been based ever since.

Keegan originally trained as a painter, but beginning in the 1980s incorporated lens-based and emerging technologies into her practice, using the photocopier and computer in both two-dimensional and installation work. Her work explores memory, history, and dress and adornment, often drawing on her extensive family archive — a photographic record of a Black middle-class Canadian family dating from the 1890s to the present. In 1984, she worked at Community Copyart in London, a Greater London Council–funded resource center where artists explored the photocopier as a printmaking tool, and the following year co-founded Copy Art, a related resource and education space for community groups and artists working with computers, scanners, and photocopiers.

Alongside her studio practice, Keegan has played a foundational role in Britain's Black Arts Movement and in the archiving of Black British art history. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings, she helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery and, in 1982, co-curated Mirror Reflecting Darkly, the first exhibition by the Black Women Artists collective. From 1985 to 1990, she was a staff member of the Women Artists Slide Library, where she established the Women Artists of Colour Index, and in the early 1990s she served as Director of the African and Asian Visual Arts Archive. She also taught New Media and Digital Diversity at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she helped establish the institution's digital-media undergraduate course.

Keegan's exhibitions include Trophies of Empire at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, and the Bluecoat, Liverpool (1992, curated by Keith Piper); Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996, presented across the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York (1997); and her solo exhibitions Rites of Passage at the ICA, London (1993) and Somewhere Between There and Here at the South London Gallery (2021). She lives and works in London.