Three enigmatic wooden boats float midair inside the Entrance Court of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA).
The vessels — “The Survivor,” “Desire,” and “The Relic” — look as if they’ve completed many hard voyages. Portholes are rusted. Sections of corrugated metal are missing from their roofs. Two of the boats feature patchwork sails like massive quilts. Cargo clutters their ghostly decks, which are devoid of people.
This installation — the sculptures are suspended at about eye-level from the court’s ceiling with wires — is part of “Hew Locke: Passages,” an exhibition on view at the YCBA through Jan. 11. The show spans the 30-year career of Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke, whose work critiques and upends the imagery and legacy of colonial and post-colonial power through eye-popping, intricate sculptures, installations, photography, and drawings.
A fleet of three ramshackle boats — “The Survivor,” “Desire,” and “The Relic,” — are suspended in the air inside the YCBA’s Entrance Court.
“Hew brings forward complex historical themes and relates them to present-day experience,” said Martina Droth, the Paul Mellon Director of the YCBA, who curated the exhibition. “The exhibition takes us on a journey into his vision of the world — dazzling, seductive, poignant, and sinister all at once.”
Born in Scotland in 1959, Locke moved to Guyana with his family in 1966 just as the South American country was establishing its independence after more than 130 years of British colonial rule. The experience shaped his work, which examines the consequences of colonialism through its legacies of global market capitalism, migration, and diaspora.
This perspective is apparent in details of the three boats. For example, a close look at “The Survivor’s” striped sail reveals images of bananas being loaded onto ships and sugarcane being cut blended with banknotes and share certificates.
Here are five more things to know about the exhibition:
1. Early in his career, Locke began creating sculptures from prefabricated consumer objects.
Two sculptures on display — “Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms)” and “Koh-i-noor” — are composed of plastic objects that one might find at a discount store: carnival beads, baby dolls, toy weaponry, fake gems, etc.
Locke would use similar materials while teaching schoolchildren about art, which inspired him to use them in his own work. “I would come back to my studio and think, ‘The kids are having more fun than me. What’s going on here?’” he said during a recent Yale visit, standing in the museum’s second-floor gallery, where the show is staged.
In “Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms),” beads and other colorful ornaments form the royal arms found on British passports. “[A British passport] gives access to a whole world, which other people aren’t entitled to,” Locke said. “People out there are literally dying to get this particular document with this particular coat of arms on it. It’s about having an object of desire which people are desperately trying to get.”
“Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms)” recreates the royal coat of arms from the cover of the British passport. It is composed of plastic objects that are stapled and screwed onto a wooden backboard cut in the shape of the image.
In “Koh-i-noor,” he used toy swords, plastic ladybugs, fake flowers, and beads to recreate the distinctive profile of the late Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving British monarch. “From up close, it just seems to be almost a kind of tangled mass of objects piled and layered one on top of the other,” said Lucinda Lax, interim head of the YCBA’s curatorial division. “Yet draw away and that profile becomes so instantly recognizable.”
2. Locke riffs on Western traditions of public statuary.
Two equestrian statues depicting Black envoys striding forward determinedly — carrying messages from the past to the future — are part of “The Ambassadors,” a series of four sculptures originally commissioned by The Lowrey, a theater and gallery in Salford, England.
YCBA student guides tour the exhibition with Locke, center-right, whose work examines the legacy of British colonialism. The sculpture at the center, Ambassador 4, was acquired by the YCBA in 2024.
One of them, “Ambassador 4,” which the YCBA recently acquired, is a woman in black armor decorated with little skulls. She carries a long black banner and wears an elongated, bulbous head dress. She is accompanied by “Ambassador 1,” a male figure draped in a cape festooned with gold ornaments. Pink flowers sprout from his steed’s head. He has a golden six-shooter on his hip. A tiny semi-automatic pistol dangles from a red sash around his waist.
“What’s so powerful about them is the way that they take that equestrian sculptural form that you can see in any sort of traditional commemorative landscape, but they’re laden with a different kind of symbolism,” Lax said. “They’re taking us into a completely different world.”
The ornamentation on the male rider’s horse includes figures of enslaved people drawn from illustrations by William Blake, the English poet, painter, and printmaker, who is the subject of “William Blake: Burning Bright,” a separate exhibition on view in the YCBA’s third-floor gallery through Nov. 30. Locke transformed Blake’s depictions of enslaved people being tortured into decorative objects of an unsettling nature.
3. The artist appears in four works on display, although his presence in them is not obvious.
“How Do You Want Me?,” a series of four life-sized self-portraits, features the artist cocooned in layers of brightly colored, carnivalesque ornamentation.
“How Do You Want Me?” is a series of life-size self-portraits that show Locke posing in elaborate disguises that suggest mythical warlords and potentates.
“They appear, at first, to be quite fun, inviting, and interesting,” Lax said. “When you start looking closely, you see underneath all the ornament, Hew’s eyes gazing out at you.”
The figures become ominous the more one engages with them. “They’re kinds of people, in a way, that take you to a different world,” she added, “but the also the kinds of people you would not want to encounter in person.”
4. Locke created his ‘Share’ series — which incorporates antique share certificates — in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
In September 2008, Locke was preparing for an exhibition in New York City when Lehman Brothers, the country’s fourth-largest investment bank at the time, collapsed, igniting the worldwide financial crisis. In response, Locke began buying antique share certificates from defunct companies. “I thought I’d start investing in dead companies,” he said.
The documents formed the basis of “Share,” a series in which Locke took the certificates he’d collected and painted over them with his own imagery. Three pieces from the series are displayed in the exhibition.
“What he has done is basically to amplify some of the existing imagery on these paper certificates,” Lax said. “When you look at them, they seem quite benign, and yet when assembled together, they provide a history of the movement of goods across and the exploitation of people across time and place.”
“Kingdom of Greece,” is part of the series, “Share,” in which Locke embellished the imagery on obsolete share certificates of defunct companies. The paper relic offer “a window into the history and movement of money, power, and ownership,” Locke has said.
5. Guyanese architecture is a source of inspiration to Locke.
Since the early 1990s, Locke has frequently turned to the architecture of Guyana, where he spent his formative years, for subject matter.
The exhibition includes a series of watercolors he made depicting typical Guyanese homes built on stilts for flood protection. In the paintings, the houses are reimagined as watercraft — their stilts rising from large canoes or rowboats.
A sculpture, “Jumbie House 1,” is a replica of a fictional Guyanese residence in disrepair. Steps are broken. Clapboards are loose or missing. The roof has gaping holes. Despite its state of decay, the house is vibrantly colored. Palm trees are painted on its bright yellow walls. The damaged roof is lilac colored. Its shutters and trim are white.
“From an American point of view, you have to imagine what happens in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward after Katrina,” Locke said. “These houses tend to be thought of as haunted, and nobody goes in them because they’ve collapsed, and people are afraid of what might be in there. But the fear comes from folklore. The fear comes from a land which has had a violent history, a violent colonial history. So, it’s understandable to a certain extent.”
