Hew Locke Unpacks the Complexity of Empire in His Biggest Museum Show Yet

Touring his recently opened exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art, artist Hew Locke told some visitors that a song came to mind: “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” written for Nina Simone in 1964. Of course, his concern is not that of the misbehaving lover seeking forgiveness, as in the song, but rather that of an artist whose work is rich with symbolism and teeming with meaningful found objects, and who plumbs complicated histories of empire, identity, and migration—especially those that deal closely with the history of the British Empire, and are coming before American audiences.

The New Haven museum bills “Hew Locke: Passages” as the artist’s most comprehensive show to date, including 49 works spanning nearly three decades and including photography, sculpture, and drawing. On view through January, it is curated by the museum’s director, Martina Droth, who was promoted from chief curator last year. 

Hew Locke, Ambassador 4 (2022). Courtesy John Hammond.

The Guyanese British artist was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and moved with his family as a child to Georgetown, the coastal capital of the small South American nation of Guyana, just as the former British colony was gaining its independence. Being there as the country created its own flag and other national iconography sensitized him to the power of symbols and how closely they are linked to identity. He lived there until moving in 1980 to Britain to attend Falmouth Art School; he then earned an MFA at the Royal College of Art in London, where he still resides. 

It’s suitable that an institution devoted to British art be his ambassador in the States for this extensive presentation. But Locke will be known to art lovers on these shores from a few projects that have brought his tart historical commentary—he often says that if he hadn’t become an artist, he could have been a historian—to U.S. museums. The first was For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), a flotilla of about 70 model boats, which came to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, alluding to his own travels as well as to what the artist has called a “hybridization of culture.” 

Installation view of Trophy 3 for The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt (2022). Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; by Anna-Marie Kellen.

New Yorkers, meanwhile, witnessed Gilt, the installation of his sculptures in the form of gilded trophies on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2022, its title punning on the “guilt” owing to the imperial acquisition of that institution’s globe-spanning holdings. And his sprawling installation The Procession (2022), commissioned by Tate Britain, was installed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2024. It features nearly 150 life-size figures, some on horseback, including drummers, soldiers and other characters, kitted out with masks and costumes, holding aloft banners and flags, ambiguously in celebration and/or protest.

How Is the Queen of England Like Bart Simpson?

One of the earliest works in the show greets visitors to the galleries: Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms), from 2004, stands some seven feet high and riffs on the U.K.’s coat of arms, which appears on the British passport.

Hew Locke, Veni, Vidi, Vici (The Queen’s Coat of Arms) (2004). Courtesy of Hales, London and New York.

On that document, a crowned lion and a unicorn flank a shield; here, the shield has been replaced by a skeletal head wearing a crown. “People are literally dying to get this document,” Locke said during the tour. In the piece, textiles and found plastic objects, including the kinds of cheap materials schoolchildren use to make collages, are visibly stapled to a plywood backing; the Black artist self-consciously cast the symbol of Britain partly in the African colors of red, black, and green. “I use clichés deliberately,” he said.

Nearby hangs Koh-i-noor (2005), a nine-foot-high relief sculpture of the bust of Queen Elizabeth II, encrusted with hundreds of plastic objects found at markets and discount shops, including toy animals, flowers, and jewelry. Discussing British imagery such as this, not necessarily immediately recognizable to Americans, he alluded to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, who said that he drew Bart Simpson in such a way that he could be recognized by his silhouette alone.

Hew Locke, Koh-i-noor (2005). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

Koh-i-noor is titled for what was once the world’s largest diamond, at 105.6 carats. Originating in a mine in India and long owned by Indian and Persian heads of state, it was ceded to Queen Victoria when she was named Empress of India, and is set in her crown; India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have all demanded its return. The queen’s profile, Locke noted, still appeared on his school workbooks in Guyana even after it gained its freedom. In his sculpture, her profile bristles with sword blades, perhaps suggesting the violent colonial enterprise at whose head Elizabeth stood. 

But in an interview, Locke warned away from simplistic interpretations. “It is complicated,” he said. “It is ambivalent.” As an example, he offered King Charles: “He didn’t choose to be born to the Queen. I see decent people in difficult situations. I met the guy and I liked him.” Locke was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to art, in 2023.

Locke Was Early to Scrutinize Public Monuments

Locke’s fascination with symbols of power, and veneration of questionable figures, extended to public monuments before they came in for a reassessment in the 2010s. As early as 2005, he pitched London public arts organization Artangel on a “statue-dressing project” in which he would “dress/disguise/reveal well-known statues in central London in order to reveal/describe aspects of British culture/history/contemporary situation.” When the proposal was rejected, the artist’s mockups for the project themselves became the pieces. 

Hew Locke, Colston (2006). Courtesy Hew Locke.

Colston (2006) shows a statue devoted to 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol that would be torn down in 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests. The photo of the merchant is decorated with medals, skeletons, shells, and symbolic talismans “intended to point to the specific crimes and misdeeds of the commemorated figure,” Droth wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “Black people had to celebrate this dodgy dude,” said the artist in the gallery. 

In our interview, Locke described Colston and the other icons he treats similarly as “weighed down by the burden of history. The people are loaded down until they can barely handle any more.” Here’s more and more gold and treasure, he said; I suggested that they might as well choke on it. “Literally,” Locke agreed. “Literally.”

Hew Locke, Saturn (2007). Courtesy Hew Locke.

In early days, Locke’s colorful works were seen as “exotic”; people would ask him if they were created for festivals, and, in his view, overly linked them to his Black identity. He went to the other extreme in the late 1990s, working only in black and white. But by the time he created Saturn (2007), he was insisting on his own presence in his work; these towering studio photographs show the artist, his eyes barely visible, encrusted with the same kind of finery that Colston and others choked on. In Saturn, he is encrusted with flowers and the heads of baby dolls, and holds a scepter. All around him appear the words honi soit qui mal y pense, the old-French motto of a British knightly order, usually translated as “shame on anyone who thinks evil of it”; that slogan, too, appears on the British coat of arms.

In that piece, Locke’s head is backed by the silhouette of the queen, recalling Groening’s Bart Simpson quip, but perhaps needing translation for U.S viewers. In our interview, Locke described a moment during a county fair that, for him, drove home the legibility of national symbols. A man representing a bird sanctuary had brought a specimen. “The feathers weren’t so good,” the artist noted before realizing it was a bald eagle. The moment the animal spread his wings, Locke said, its symbolism came crashing down on him: “It’s America!”

Sailing Into the Future

In other pieces, like the watercolor Guyana House Boat (2018), Locke looks to his other home country, to which he periodically returns, for inspiration.

Hew Locke, Guyana House Boat 4 (2018). Courtesy Hew Locke.

The country’s name, he pointed out in the gallery, comes from an indigenous language and means “land of many waters.” In an era of rampant sea level rise, that’s not always a blessing: its capital, Georgetown, where Locke lived, is about six feet below sea level, and the country suffers regular flooding, so the notion of putting a Guyanese home in a kind of ark resonates not only with travel, migration, and cultural hybridization, but also with dire environmental threats.

Sculptures by Hew Locke hang in the lobby of the Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Brian Boucher.

Entering and leaving the museum’s imposing building, designed by renowned architect Louis I. Kahn, the visitor encounters a small assembly of sculptures of boats, hanging from the ceiling of the atrium, a few feet above the floor. Desire (2018), The Survivor (2022), and The Relic (2022) bring the house boat drawing into three dimensions, and evoke his earlier, larger flotilla, For Those in Peril On the Sea (2011), even as it also evokes migration, sea level rise, Britain’s maritime history, and the Middle Passage. All sailing in the same direction, they also echo the ambiguous parade of Procession (2022); while the cause being celebrated and protested there is ambiguous, the artist once described the figures as all headed “into the future.”

The future may look no better than the complicated, violent past that Locke explores. But, like it or not, into the future we all sail together.

“Hew Locke: Passages” is on view at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut, through January 11, 2026. It will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1971 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio, where it will be on view February 13-May 24, 2026, and to the Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet St, Houston, Texas, where it will be on view June 21–September 13, 2026.