Multimedia artist Rita Keegan and Editor-in-Chief Tschabalala Self sit down to discuss how assemblage serves as a shared language between their practices.
My conversation with Rita Keegan reads like a transatlantic visit between family: warm, funny, and full of small revelations. We swap stories about our shared NYC upbringing rooted in the Bronx and Harlem with long spells in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London, as we reflect on the ways that these places and spaces shaped our practices. From Rita’s life-long love of scissors, glue and photocopy to my painterly affection for fabric and stitch—our practices utilize collage as a means for self discovery.
What follows is a generous, layered exchange about flourishing, building cultural infrastructure and self actualization. Read below for our candid reflections on womanhood, identity, teaching, and the alchemy of assemblage.
Tschabalala Self: Hi Rita.
Rita Keegan: I hope you’re feeling better.
TS: Yes, I am feeling better. I was a little bit under the weather after traveling, but now I’m feeling much better. How are you?
RK: I’m fine. So your spirit has caught up to your body? That’s what I always feel like after I travel. But, I’m great. The sun’s almost out. I don’t know if you’re familiar with English weather, but that’s not always the state of play.
TS: How long have you been living in London?
RK: I moved here in 1980, so for a long time.
TS: How do you like living there?
RK: Well my mother was from the Caribbean and my father was Canadian, so I understand the Commonwealth and also the young black British because a lot of them were from the Caribbean.
TS: True.
RK: And in a strange way, being a foreigner is how you’re treated in America anyway. So at least I could name my foreignness.
TS: Yes, that makes sense. You’ve maintained your American accent, which is nice.
RK: Well, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Every time I say “boss,” there’s a little gremlin that sits on my shoulder and just rolls around hysterically.
TS: [laughs] Do you say schedule (she-jul) instead of schedule (sked-jool)?
RK: I have to think about it. But most people know that I’m from the Bronx so it’s always going to be coffee (caw-fee).
TS: Well, I’m from Harlem and I’ve spent a lot of time in London and I’ve enjoyed it. It’s nice to meet someone that’s moved there, who’s from the Bronx, and who’s also a fellow artist—that’s unique.
RK: I went to art and design. Did you go to music and art or one of those?
TS: No, I went to a school called Nightingale Bamford. It’s on the Upper East Side, it’s an all girls high school.
RK: In New York, especially when I was there, there were art based schools that really made the transition from home to the larger world a lot more fluid.
TS: Those schools are still around—many of them are still in New York—but I didn’t end up going to any of them. I actually didn’t go to a traditional art school for college. I went to Bard, where I studied art. Same with high school—I focused on art there as well. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I was in a dedicated art program. Before that, I attended more general academic schools, which I think really benefited me. It gave me the chance to take a variety of classes and explore different interests.
RK: I was basically born an artist. It was the only thing I ever wanted to be—from the time I was about five years old, I knew I wanted to be an artist. It felt set in stone. Honestly, having dyslexia probably helped me lean more into the creative side. Just give me a crayon, some glue, and a pair of scissors—that was all I needed. That was me.
TS: What is your primary medium that you work in?
RK: I don’t really have a single medium, and I always joke and call it “an art form.” I majored in painting in college—I went to the San Francisco Art Institute. But I also have a background in textiles; I studied fashion in high school, including costume design and fashion illustration.
I come from a long line of makers—especially clothing makers. My great-great-grandmother was an incredible seamstress, so textiles have always played a strong role in my practice. It was a very different world back then in terms of what was considered an “art practice” and what you were allowed or expected to do, but I’ve never been afraid to experiment.
I always liked printmaking, and that’s actually how I got into photocopy art. Especially when you don’t have access to a full studio or expensive materials, photocopying was a great way to explore printmaking and get creative with what you had.
TS: Yes, definitely.
RK: But as an art of immediacy, you can put it in a C4 folder and just walk, you know, and then assemble the stuff, you know, wherever you go. But like you, I always liked collaging and, you know, scissors and glue that was me, you know.
TS: You said your mother’s from the Caribbean. Which Caribbean nation is she from?
RK: She was born in Canada—her father was a doctor—but she was raised in Dominica.
TS: So a real child of the Commonwealth.
RK: Yeah.
TS: Very cool. And your father’s people, are they also from Canada?
RK: Yeah. His people were the Underground Railroad. His great-grandmother was the daughter of a white woman and an enslaved man, so she couldn’t be held in slavery and was sent to Canada.
TS: Okay, I see.
RK: So there’s a whole Black community that was there from the pre-Civil War era. My father’s grandfather was from New Orleans and supposedly he walked from New Orleans to Canada as a free man.
TS: That’s incredible. How did he do that?
RK: Exactly.
TS: I know it’s a 19-hour drive, so it’s definitely a long walk. My family’s also from New Orleans.
RK: I love New Orleans. It’s really an amazing place. People look you in the face, and they’re like, “You must be family.” And probably somewhere along the line, I am. It’s small enough that that’s probably true. It’s only about 200,000 people in that city. You went to Bard College, right?
TS: Yeah, in upstate New York. And you?
RK: I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, lived there about five years, traveled around, then came to England, also lived in Holland for a while, and then came back and lived in L.A. I figured I had some L.A. dues to pay. The bag ladies there had shopping carts and tans, and I thought, “Well, worse comes to worst, it can’t be that bad.”
TS: What brought you to London?
RK: Just curiosity. I wanted to see it before it disappeared. I guess we all want to do a Grand Tour of sorts of sorts. The first time I came here, my passport got stolen. I went to the embassy, then they lost my papers, so I was stuck. A friend of mine came to visit—Sylvester, the singer—and he told me I was crazy and to get my ass back home. So I went back and lived in L.A. for a while.
Because my parents were Commonwealth, it wasn’t difficult for me to settle here. Plus, you had the rise of the Black community. As long as you could get sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas, you could survive.
TS: What was the art community like when you were living in Los Angeles? What year was that?
RK: There was no art community. I lived there until ’78, ’79. L.A. was great if you wanted commercial movies, music, set design, that kind of thing. It wasn’t necessarily culturally diverse at the time. And if you were a woman—especially a woman of color—you didn’t get a look in.
I knew a lot of people making music. It was the era of singer-songwriters—Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon—we were all a similar age, hanging out, partying. It was the ’70s.
TS: Who were some of your peers in the visual arts?
RK: In college I had an amazing teacher named Mary Lovelace O’Neal, who introduced me to David Driskell, her mentor. There were peers, but no real “scene,” especially for Black practitioners. Even after graduation, there wasn’t a degree show. You were just sent off to do whatever you did. But I had incredible teachers—Imogen Cunningham and Carlos Villa, filmmakers, photographers. The Bay Area was buzzing with creativity, especially music—Sylvester, all that late ’60s sound. There was creativity, but it wasn’t necessarily on walls.
TS: That makes sense. Do you feel like you draw a lot of inspiration from music and other art forms—film, literature, theater?
RK: Absolutely. It’s all about visual culture, and I grew up with an amazing soundtrack—from Betty Boop and Billie Holiday on TV, to my parents playing jazz, to my brother bringing in Latin music, Joe Cuba, Tito Puente, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan. Then Motown, then British pop. It was a really diverse mix.
In San Francisco, you could go to concerts every week—sometimes for free. I can’t separate my life from a soundtrack. Even now I try to listen to contemporary music, but a lot feels derivative. There’s some good stuff, though.
TS: I think you’re right about that. So, for people not familiar with your work, how would you describe your process—especially your use of collage and immediacy?
RK: With printmaking, you need space—for drying, for equipment. With photocopying, all you need is paper, scissors, glue. There was an amazing Canon copier at an organization I worked with called Copyart. You could swap toners—red, green, brown, blue—so you could layer images like silk-screening.
You could photocopy on the same piece of paper multiple times, like printmaking, but it was immediate. You didn’t always know what you’d get until it came out of the machine. Sometimes the toner overheated and warped the paper—that unpredictability became part of the work.
I could put lace on the copier, Victorian flower prints, anything—it all became a palette. And because I didn’t always have a studio, I worked at the kitchen table, scaling up with blocks, adapting to whatever space I had.
TS: I love that idea of “textiles and found” materials as your palette. I think of my fabric collection the same way.
RK: Exactly.
TS: Where do you currently live in London?
RK: Vauxhall.
TS: Vauxhall, okay. I know you were involved in starting the Brixton Art Gallery, right?
RK: Yes. It was in a squatted railway arch. Brixton’s diversity was exciting, and I was also involved with the Women Artists Slide Library.
TS: You were part of the Woman of Colour Index, correct? Tell me more about this.
RK: Yes. I collected and archived work by women artists of color. I’ve always thought it’s important to document ourselves, because otherwise someone else will rewrite our history. And with Copyart, because their copier was portable, we’d do workshops in different places—Brixton, then later Camden—teaching people how to make posters, zines, flyers.
TS: That’s amazing. Earlier, you mentioned that in L.A. you felt there wasn’t really a community, especially for women artists of color. Was that why you were so motivated to create communities in the UK?
RK: Partly. Growing up in New York, you knew about the Harlem Renaissance—it was part of the culture. But there wasn’t necessarily a feminist art community. This was the early days of women’s liberation, civil rights. I see myself as a witness to those shifts, but I was never going to deny my race, my gender, my body. I was raised to step up.
TS: That’s powerful. I agree—it’s about celebration, not shame.
RK: Exactly. It’s hard, though. There’s internal policing and external policing. Body shaming, hair shaming—that’s always existed. The worst thing is secrecy. I think it’s about owning yourself, not letting those voices—internal or external—define you.
TS: Yes. It’s hard, especially for young women.
RK: It’s always been hard, just in different forms. But yes, now it spreads even more broadly—men deal with eating disorders too. These are community sicknesses. They don’t stay quarantined. Where are you living at the moment?
TS: I live in the Hudson Valley, right on the river. I love being close to the water and having a yard—it reminds me of my grandparents home in New Orleans.
RK: Beautiful. I grew up splitting time between Collingwood, Canada—a very Anne of Green Gables kind of place—and the Bronx. So I had both: small-town summers and big-city winters. I used the city—museums, bus passes, everything. Vauxhall now feels like a village: Bonnington Square, green, quirky, bohemian. It’s the first time since childhood I’ve had a real neighborhood.
TS: I love that. Harlem was like that in the ‘90s too, before gentrification. It felt like a village.
RK: Exactly.
TS: I want to ask about feminism in your work. Did you identify with mainstream feminism, even though it often centered a white female experience?
RK: My entry was through women’s art history. I always assumed feminism was about equality, and we all need equality. It was powerful to discover that the women I’d seen in paintings weren’t just muses—they were artists themselves. It had never occurred to me.
When the Tate acquired my work, I thought: as a child, I never would’ve imagined seeing myself on those walls. Growing up, women didn’t paint. Black people didn’t paint. We weren’t represented. That absence shaped me.
TS: I think that’s so important. Seeing your work in the Tate is inspiring.
RK: Exactly. Representation matters. And creativity is work—it’s not just a “gift.” It’s labor, practice, commitment.
TS: When people encounter your work, what would you like them to take away?
RK: Ideally, transformation—but I don’t count on that. First, people see surface. If they want to go deeper, the work is layered for that. I like pretty, I like fulfilling visual desire, but that’s not the whole meaning. It’s layered, like the collage itself. If you want to look deeper, there’s more to see.
TS: That’s beautiful Rita. I want to get your information, so when I’m in London next, I can reach out. It was so nice to meet you, you’re such a kind lady and I really like your energy.
RK: I am an auntie.
TS: Yes, that’s it. You’re an auntie.
RK: I’m your auntie.
TS: Thank you Rita, I need an auntie in London.
Written by Tschabalala Self
