Rita Keegan

Born in the Bronx in 1949, Rita is of Caribbean and Black-Canadian descent and moved to London in 1980 having studied Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1969-1972. Her work explores memory, history, dress and adornment, often through the use of her extensive family archive – a photo- graphic record of a black middle class Canadian family dating from 1890s to present day.

Alongside contemporaries Keith Piper and Gary Stewart, her practice is a defining example of the ways in which new media experimentation intersect with the British Black Arts Movement. In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton uprisings, Rita helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery, curating Mirror Reflecting Darkly, the first exhibition by The Black Women Artists collective in 1982.

She was the co-founder in 1984 of Copy Art, a resource and education space for community groups and artists working with the emerging technologies of computers, scanners and photocopiers. From 1985 – 1990 Rita was a staff member of the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL), where she established the Women Artists of Colour Index. In the early 1990s she was the Director of the African and Asian Visual Arts Archive (AAVAA). Alongside her artistic and archival practice, Rita also taught New Media and Digital Diversity at Goldsmiths, where she helped establish the digital-media undergraduate.