Unboxing the collection, Mirror Reflecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive is an intimate portrait of artist, archivist, educator, curator and collector Rita Keegan. The publication distributed by Goldsmiths Press, which is now available for pre-order charts Keegan’s journey from a childhood in the Bronx, to her training as an artist in San Francisco, to her migration to the UK in 1980 and immersion in the Black British Art Movement.
Mirror Reflecting Darkly: The Rita Keegan Archive documents the artistic practice of Rita Keegan: from exhibitions at major venues to everyday life as a working Black female artist. Accompanying the selections from the archive are essays and personal reflections from a range of writers, academics. and artists—including Keegan herself–which expand upon the themes from the material: networks of creative kinship, the story of British Black Arts, self-archiving, and archiving as activism.
Contributors
Barby Asante, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Janice Cheddie, Lauren Craig, Lucy Davies, Althea Greenan, Joy Gregory, Hiroko Hagiwara, Matthew Harle, Rita Keegan, Shaheen Merali, Naomi PearceÂ