Donald Locke: Nexus

nexus: from the Latin nectere—to bind, tie, connect

In 1992, Guyanese-born Donald Locke (1930-2010) was one of the first artists in residence at Nexus, now Atlanta Contemporary. At 61, Locke’s migration arc had taken him throughout the United Kingdom and United States. He astutely predicted his five years at Nexus would shift his practice, noting “This is the beginning, the nucleus of something.” Three decades later, the exhibition returns to the site of Nexus and to the 1990s as a generative chapter in his oeuvre where an ethos of experimentation and boundlessness flourished. It probes how Locke’s tenacious pursuit of the idea of nexus itself permeated his work. 

Locke transformed the canvas into networks of interlocking images to link histories and geographies of the American South to the Global South. He juxtaposed figures of the Civil War with portraits of the unknown, placed images of Guyana’s colonial houses in conversation

with Southern mansions, and aligned sugarcane landscapes of the Caribbean with plantation imagery of the South. He inserted images of his sculptures and ceramics—revealing an artist inviting critical inquiry of his own response to these histories.

To connect painting to sculpture and architecture, Locke built his wooden structures and affixed a matrix of materials—metal grills, tools, wood fragments, fur, alligator skin, velvet. As a master carpenter, he excised hollow boxes, hand carved deep gashes of color, and built the mechanics to continue the narrative on the back of his paintings. 

Throughout Locke’s work, these elements repeat, reemerge, and recur—pointing to an artist in constant reckoning with the weight and pervasiveness they occupy.

Atlanta Contemporary Atlanta, Georgia October 24, 2024–February 2, 2025