Join us online for the Girl Friday Breakfast Club with Barbara Walker MBE RA on Friday 1 September 2023 at 8am (UK time), convened by Anita Taylor. 

Barbara Walker MBE RA was born in Birmingham, England, in 1964. She studied at the University of Central England and completed post-graduate studies at Wolverhampton University. She lives and works in Birmingham. Her work is informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her. Growing up in Birmingham, her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative drawings and paintings tell contemporary stories hinged on historical circumstances, making them universally understood and reflecting a human perspective on the state of affairs in her native Britain and elsewhere. Walker was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in December 2022. She was the 2020 Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School at Rome. In 2019 she was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours for services to British Art and in 2017 she exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale as part of the Diaspora Pavilion. In 2017 she received the Drawing Room Bursary Award, and the inaugural Evelyn Williams Drawing Award in association with the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2019 and Jerwood Gallery. She has previously been an artist in residence at Facebook’s headquarters in London. Walker’s recent solo exhibitions include Vanishing Point, Cristea Roberts Gallery (2022); Place Space Who (2019) at Turner Contemporary; Vanishing Point at Jerwood Gallery (2018); Shock and Awe at Midlands Arts Centre (2016). Her works have been included in significant group exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including: Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023); Life Between Islands, Caribbean - British Art, 50s to Now, Tate Britain (2021); Lahore Biennale: Between the Sun and the Moon (2020); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts (2019); Protest and Remembrance, Alan Cristea Gallery (2019); Zeichen, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen (2018); A Slice Through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings, Modern Art Oxford (2018); and The Gallery of Small Things, Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2018). Barbara Walker is nominated for the Turner Prize 2023.

Anita Taylor is an artist, curator and Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) at the University of Dundee. She is the founding Director of the foremost annual drawing exhibition in the UK, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize [since 1994], and Drawing Projects UK, a public-facing initiative dedicated to drawing [since 2009].

The Girl Friday Breakfast Club was established by Kate Reynolds and Anita Taylor in 2018 to provide a friendly and informal space for women to meet and to hear from an interesting woman speaker over breakfast at Drawing Projects UK on the last Friday of each month. We held our first online Girl Friday in October 2020 and aim to retain the informal format online; events are not recorded, so please do book to join in. All women, and those who identify as women, are very welcome to join the Girl Friday Breakfast Club.

Tickets: Single tickets for this event are available here, numbers permitting. 

Joining the online event: Please note that the Zoom link to join this event will be made available in the online event information that you will find once you have registered for the event - you will need to log into Eventbrite to find this. You will then either need to click on the joining link OR copy and paste the link into your web browser to join the event on the day. 

We look forward to welcoming you!

#FirstFridays #GirlFriday #BreakfastClub #HerStory #WomenInspiringWomen #InspirationalWomen #InspiringWomen #Artist