Donald Locke b . British Guiana 1930 – 2010 ; worked in Guyana , United Kingdom , and United States
Songs for the Mighty Sparrow : The Ballad of Monkey Mountain , 1998 Acrylic , collage , mixed-media on canvas Courtesy of the estate of Donald Locke
Donald Locke left British Guiana for England in 1954 . As his artistic career evolved , Locke would embark on multiple migrations across three lands , Guyana , United Kingdom , and United States , geographic spaces which deeply informed his work .
In Songs for the Mighty Sparrow : The Ballad of Monkey Mountain , Locke layers the canvas with magazine advertising , snapshots of his bronze female nude sculptures , and a monkey in its natural habitat , alluding to the work ’ s title “ Monkey Mountain ,” a remote terrain in Guyana ’ s Potaro- Siparuni region . Locke also adds photographic imagery of Guyana ’ s past sourced from its newspapers : black and white passport portraits charged with notions of both belonging and displacement . A weave of meandering gestural black forms rests on the grid of images . The canvas is punctuated by red , green , yellow , and gold colors and two blue upward facing arrow shapes . By 1998 , when The Ballad of Monkey Mountain was completed , Locke had settled in Atlanta . His encounters with a canon of African- American artists catalyzed for him a breaking away from a European colonial legacy of artmaking , what he called “ an alien inheritance .” In a 2003 interview , Locke remarked on his migration story , “ You can ’ t escape from what is imprinted in you . . . I had to leave to do this work .”