The Royal Academy of Arts has elected Veronica Ryan, Barbara Walker and Roger Hiorns as new Royal Academicians, at a recent General Assembly meeting. An honorary Royal Academician title was given to Kerry James Marshall Hon RA and Professor Ngaire Woods CBE becomes an Honorary Fellow.
Barbara Walker, RA Elect (Category of Membership: Painting) Barbara Walker, RA Elect (Category of Membership: Painting)
Barbara Walker was born in Birmingham, England, in 1964. She studied at the University of Central England, Birmingham, and completed post-graduate studies at Wolverhampton University. She lives and works in Birmingham. Her work is informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her. Growing up in Birmingham, her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative drawings and paintings tell contemporary stories hinged on historical circumstances, making them universally understood and reflecting a human perspective on the state of affairs in her native Britain and elsewhere.
Roger Hiorns, RA Elect (Category of Membership: Sculpture)
Roger Hiorns, RA Elect (Category of Membership: Sculpture) Hiorns was born in Birmingham in 1975. He received his BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 1996. His primary media is Painting, Sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood, brain matter, crystallization and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography. Hiorns’ work is involved in the contemporary problem of identifying meaning and significance in the world. He involves himself in objects and behaviour that contradict the conditioned and appropriate approach to the art-making of his forebears and his contemporaries.
Veronica Ryan, RA Elect (Category of Membership: Sculpture)
Turner Prize winner 2022, Veronica Ryan was born in 1956 in Plymouth, Montserrat, an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. She moved in as an infant with her parents to London before studying at the St. Albans College of Art & Design, Bath Academy of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. Ryan attended SOAS University of London between 1981–1983. Ryan divides her time between the USA and UK. Ryan creates sculptural objects and installations using containers, compartments, and combinations of natural and fabricated forms to reference displacement, fragmentation and alienation.
Honorary Royal Academician
Kerry James Marshall Hon RA Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his BFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978, where he was later awarded an honorary doctorate in 1999. Marshall’s work reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with six centuries of representational Painting, Marshall has deftly reinterpreted and updated its tropes, compositions, and styles, even pulling talismans from the canvases of his forbearers and recontextualizing them within a modern setting. At the centre of his prodigious oeuvre, which also includes drawings, Sculpture and photography, is the critical recognition of the conditions of invisibility so long ascribed to black bodies in the Western pictorial tradition and the creation of what he calls a ‘counter-archive’ that reinscribes these figures within its narrative arc.
King George III founded the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. It has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to be a clear, strong voice for art and artists. Its public programme promotes the creation, enjoyment and appreciation of the visual arts through exhibitions, education and debate. Royalacademy.org.uk, The Royal Academy, is an independent charity. It does not receive revenue funding from the government, so it is reliant upon the support of its visitors, donors, sponsors, patrons and loyal Friends.
The Royal Academy of Arts is governed by up to 100 Royal Academicians who are all practising artists or architects. On reaching the age of 75, they become Senior Academicians, thus initiating vacancies for new Members. Elections are held at regular meetings of the General Assembly when new Members are voted in by existing RAs. In addition, Royal Academicians can elect artists from outside the UK as Honorary RAs. Honorary Fellows and Honorary Members, eminent individuals from beyond the art world, are nominated by the President, with the Council’s approval and the General Assembly’s sanction.