HOUSTON, TX.- Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke combines found materials and iconic imagery to create theatrical tableaux that address iconographies of empire, history and collective memory. “A lot of my work has to do with the burden of history and how history affects us today,” Locke has explained. “If I wasn’t an artist, I would be a historian.” From June 21 through September 13, 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Hew Locke: Passages, the most comprehensive survey to date devoted to the work of this acclaimed artist.
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Hew Locke: Passages
By Martina Droth
A richly illustrated contemporary art volume exploring Hew Locke’s powerful reflections on history, empire, migration, monuments, and visual memory.
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Spanning the 1990s through to the present, Hew Locke: Passages showcases the spectrum of Locke’s practice, with over 40 sculptures, collages, and assemblages that examine the histories of colonialism across five continents, filtered through present-day realities of global trade, migration and diaspora. Highlights of the exhibition include examples of Locke’s richly detailed Infanta charcoal drawings (1998), which reinterpret the imperial portraits of Diego Velázquez; his altered royal coats of arms and historic stock-share certificates (2004–2014); his suspended sailing vessels, which summon up both trans-Atlantic histories of enslavement and current refugee crises (2016–2022); and his reimagining of commemorative equestrian monuments: Sikandar (2010), Ambassador 1 (2021) and Ambassador 4 (2022).
“It is a pleasure to collaborate with our partners at the Yale Center for British Art to bring the work of Hew Locke to Houston audiences,” comments Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH. “The range and scale of the work of this acclaimed artist, whose powerful imagery reflects universal themes of history, collective memory and cultural legacy, is deeply compelling.”
“Over the past 30 years, Hew Locke has resolutely broken open deep-rooted conceptions of national identity and examined the visual cultures that they have generated,” notes Brittany Webb, curator, modern and contemporary art, at the MFAH. “Wit, passion, beauty and compassion and deep research inform this work, which directly engages our attention and pushes us to challenge long-held beliefs and reinvent them in thought-provoking ways.”
Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1959 and moved with his family to Georgetown, Guyana in 1966. He returned to Britain in 1980 and earned his BA in fine art from Falmouth School of Art in 1988 and an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1994. In 2022, he was elected a member of The Royal Academy of Arts, and the following year, received the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for Services to Art.
Locke’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums in Britain and the US. In 2022, he was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to create a series of sculptures, Gilt, for the building’s storied façade. His large-scale installation The Procession, commissioned in 2022 for Tate Britain, was subsequently shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2023. In 2024, Locke curated What have we here? at the British Museum, a critically lauded exhibition that put items from the museum’s collection into conversation with his own art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Yale Center for British Art, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and Tate, London, among others. He lives in London.
A scholarly, fully illustrated monograph published by Yale University Press and co-edited by Martina Droth and Allie Biswas accompanies the exhibition, with contributions from Hew Locke, Kelly Baum, Indie A. Choudhury, Courtney J. Martin, Saloni Mathur, Asma Naeem, Rachel Stratton and Clarrie Wallis.
