Tam Joseph in Conversation with Adelaide Damoah: Art Success

Tam Joseph is a uniquely talented, multidimensional artist. There are primarily two reasons why, within the context of Black artists in Britain, Joseph is such a fascinating individual. The first is his age. He was born in Dominica, in the Caribbean, in 1947. He came to London at the age of eight, eventually going on to fractious, unsatisfactory periods of study at London art colleges in the late 1960s. He has, since the end of that decade, maintained and developed his practice as a visual artist and sometime sculptor.

This makes him, on the one hand, too young to be linked to major figures of Caribbean and African art who made London their home in the decades immediately following the end of World War Two. For example, Ronald Moody had been born in 1900, Aubrey Williams had been born in 1926, Frank Bowling had been born in 1936 and Uzo Egonu had been born in 1931. In time, these artists came to be respected as elder statesmen, but Tam Joseph was too young to be included in their number. But Joseph’s age, on the other hand, makes him too old to be properly linked to the fiery, boisterous young Black artists, typified by Keith Piper (born 1960) and Donald Rodney (born 1961) whose brand of ‘Black Art’ descended like a whirlwind on Britain in the early 1980s. Quite possibly, it is for this reason that Tam Joseph is very much his own man, his own painter.

For more information, please visit: www.tamjosephartlive.com or http://www.eddiechambers.com/exhibitions/tam-joseph-history-1998/